The following excerpt is from the book Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore. Copyright © 2020 by Elizabeth Wetmore. Reprinted courtesy of Harper Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Valentine

SUNDAY MORNING, FEBRUARY 15

It will be cold comfort, knowing she is not alone. Plenty of other women have gone before her. By the time she pulls into the fire lane at Sam Houston Elementary, two suitcases and a shoebox of family pictures hidden in the trunk, Ginny Pierce knows plenty of stories about those other women, the ones who ran off. But Ginny is not the running-off kind. She will be back in a year, two at the most. As soon as she has a job, an apartment, a little money in the bank—she is coming back for her daughter.

Mama, why are you crying? Debra Ann asks, and Ginny tells her, It’s just my allergies, honey, and D. A. shakes her head in the same manner she does everything, fiercely—It’s February, too early for allergies—as if that settles it. And Ginny swallows the stone in her throat. Could you scoot over here for a minute, honey? Let me see your face?

Her daughter is nearly ten. She is going to remember this day—the two of them sitting together in the front seat of the getaway car, a shaky and capricious Pontiac Ginny has been driving since high school. D. A. will remember her mother reaching out suddenly and pulling her across the front seat until they are sitting with their shoulders pressed together.

Ginny will remember pushing her daughter’s fine brown hair out of her eyes, the smell of oatmeal and Ivory soap, the chocolate on her chin from the Valentine’s candy she’s been eating all morning, and the shine on her cheeks from the suntan lotion Ginny swiped across her face before they left the house. When she reaches for her daughter to rub in a smudge of lotion on her chin, Ginny’s hand trembles and she thinks, Take her. Make it work somehow. But Debra Ann scoots away, saying, Quit it! Because to her, this is still like any other Sun- day morning and her mother might be nagging her about any of the usual things. To her, even Ginny’s tears have become old hat.

The car door, when it slams closed, nearly catches Ginny’s finger. A backpack slung over one shoulder, D. A.’s basketball striking the concrete and rolling onto the dusty playground, a hand thrown casually in the air, her daughter walking away from the car. Bye, Mama. Bye, Debra Ann.

Ginny’s grandma never much cared to talk about the women who made it out alive, but the stories about the ones who died trying? They are bright and enduring, as if somebody took a branding iron and seared them into Ginny’s memory.

In the spring of 1935 a cattleman’s wife served lunch to a dozen ranch hands and then hanged herself on the front porch. She didn’t even wash the dishes, Grandma said, just set them in the sink, took off her apron, and walked upstairs to change into her favorite shirtwaister. As if that were the story, the sink full of dishes. Later that afternoon a cowherd came up to the house to fill a water barrel and found her—a kitchen chair knocked over on the front porch, the wind slowly turning her round and round, back and forth, one bare foot peeking from beneath her skirt. It took them two days to find that missing shoe, her grandma said, and Ginny imagined a brown leather slipper, kicked far out into the yard and covered over with sand.

Another woman left a note saying that she had to see something green, anything at all, a dogwood, a magnolia, a little St. Augustine grass. She saddled up her husband’s best mare and dug in her heels, and they were flying fast across the desert when they ran into a barbed-wire fence just this side of Midland. It’s easy to get turned around out there, Grandma said, if you don’t know where you’re going.

Even those women who toed the line couldn’t escape Grandma’s stories. They got lost in sleet storms on their way home from church. They ran out of food and firewood in the middle of a blizzard. They buried babies that had been picked up and flung against the earth by a twister, and children who wandered into the yard during a dust storm and suffocated on the dirt from their own front yards. Sometimes Ginny thought her grandma didn’t know how to tell a story with a happy ending.

On the other side of Ginny’s windshield, the I-20 lies stretched out like a dead body. Up above, the sky is bland and unblinking. Nothing out here but that open road she’s been dreaming about, though at the moment she can barely see it. She turns on the junior college radio station, and Joni Mitchell’s voice fills the car, achingly beautiful, clear and certain as a church bell, or a plainsong, and it is unbearable. Ginny cannot turn it off fast enough. Now there is only the persistent thrum of road noise, and a worrisome little screak under the hood. When she presses down on the accelerator and the noise grows louder, she holds her breath and crosses her fingers.

At the turnoff to Mary Rose Whitehead’s house, Ginny switches on the blinker, takes her foot off the gas, and considers the turn. She imagines herself driving up the dirt road and knocking on the door of the woman she once stood outside the high school with, both of them waiting, Mary Rose for her mother and Ginny for her grandma, to pick them up and take them home for good.

The final bell had not yet rung, and they stood alone in the parking lot, their purses stuffed with gym suits and the con- tents of their school lockers, both of their noses red and sore from crying in the nurse’s office. Mary Rose was turning a small metal padlock over and over in her hand. She was seven- teen years old and as of thirty minutes ago, pregnant enough that somebody took notice. I thought my life was taking for- ever to get started, Mary Rose said, but not now. Do you know what I mean? Ginny, barely past her fifteenth birthday, shook her head and stared at the ground. She tried to imagine what her grandmother was going to say about this, Ginny making the same mistake as the daughter she had lost to a car accident a decade earlier.

Mary Rose leaned down and scratched her ankle. She stood back up, reared back, and hurled the lock against the side of a pickup truck. The girls watched it bounce off the door without leaving a mark. Well, Mary Rose said, I guess we’re in it now.

Yes we were, Ginny thinks, and she pushes the accelerator to the floor.

Still, when all the shouting and tears and threats were done, the baby was perfect. Ginny and Jim Pierce could hardly believe it. Look what they did. They made a person. A daughter! So they dug their King James out of a moving box and hunted up a fine, strong name. Deborah, Awake, awake, utter a song! But the county clerk spelled it Debra and they didn’t have the three bucks to resubmit the paperwork, so Debra it is—and Jim went to work in the oil patch while Ginny played house.

Afternoons while her daughter napped, Ginny liked to sit quietly and look at magazines with photographs of places she had never even heard of. She thumbed through art books that she found at the bookmobile, filled with photographs of murals and paintings and sculptures. She turned the pages slowly, marveling that somebody thought to make these things in the first place, wondering if the artists ever imagined some- one like her looking at their work. Ginny loves her daughter, but she feels like she’s sitting in the bottom of a rain barrel, and there’s a steady drizzle filling it up.

And it is for this reason—more than the men on the street who holler every time she steps out of her car to gas up, or the unceasing wind and relentless stench of natural gas and crude oil, even more than the loneliness that is briefly staved off, sometimes, when Jim comes home from work, or Debra Ann climbs into her lap even though she is too big to stay for more than a minute—that Ginny takes five hundred dollars from their joint account and one of the road atlases from the family bookcase, and drives out of West Texas as if her life depends upon it.

There was a man who ran a cow-calf operation on the same piece of land where he lived with his wife and three children. During the 1934 drought, the price of cattle fell to twelve dollars a head, not even worth the cost of moving them to the stockyards in Fort Worth. They shot them in the forehead, Grandma said, sometimes the government men who came to make sure the ranchers had thinned their herds out, but more often, the ranchers themselves, who didn’t feel it was right to ask a stranger to do their dirty work. The men stood over the bodies with kerosene-soaked rags in their hands, pausing awkwardly, as if everything might change if only they waited a few more minutes, days, weeks. Sighing, they lit the rags and then stood back and shook their heads. But there was always one old bull that wouldn’t die, who bawled and staggered as shot after shot struck his tough old skin, his flank, his heart girth. There was always one old cow everybody thought was dead, but then she rose up and wandered off across the field, smoke rising from her flanks, the stench of singed hair drifting behind her. All this, Grandma said, and the wind blew all day, every day.

Some men down from Austin arrived one morning to find a pile of cattle still smoldering in an open field. The rancher was dead in the barn. His wife lay a few feet away, fingers still curled around the pistol, and the front door of the main house was standing wide open, the wind slamming it madly against the frame. The men found the children locked in an upstairs bedroom, where the oldest, a boy of seven, handed the men an envelope with train fare and a scrap of catalog paper. A brief note was scribbled underneath the name and address of a sister in Ohio: I love my children. Please send them home.

Ginny’s grandma was a toothy old woman, a believer in hellfire and hard work and punishment that fit the crime. If the devil comes knocking on your front door in the middle of the night, she liked to say, chances are you flirted with him at the dance. When she delivered the punch line, she clapped her hands twice sharply, just to make sure Ginny was paying attention.

I’m not going, the oldest boy told the cowhands. I’m staying right here in Texas. Well, all righty, one of the men said. You can come home with me, then.

So there’s your happy ending, Virginia

She is less than thirty miles from Odessa when the whine under the hood of her car sharpens and grows louder, a steady keen that does not abate even when she slows to fifty, then forty-five, then forty. Eighteen-wheelers blow their horns and pass on the right, the wind shaking her car and nudging it toward the median. And then the sound stops. The car shudders once, as if shaking off its troubles, and she drives on, fifty, fifty-five, sixty miles per hour.

The sun stares down on her, flat-faced and bland. By now, Debra Ann has probably beaten every girl in the neighbor- hood at basketball. Or she is sitting on the bleachers, looking through her backpack for the sandwich that Ginny packed. Or she is walking home, the basketball a steady heartbeat against the sidewalk. D. A. is going to be fine for a couple of years. She is the best part of each parent—the boy who was a second-string quarterback and the girl who loved Joni Mitchell, two kids who hardly knew each other when they drank too much Jack Daniel’s at the homecoming dance and took a drive through the oil patch during the worst sleet storm of 1966, a story as common as dust on a windowpane.

What kind of woman runs out on her husband and her daughter? The kind who understands that the man who shares her bed is, and will always be, just the boy who got her pregnant. The kind who can’t stand thinking that she might someday tell her own daughter: All this ought to be good enough for you. The kind who believes she is coming back, just as soon as she finds someplace where she can settle down.

Come to think of it, country and western singers, those purveyors of sad songs and murder ballads where a good woman gone bad gets her just desserts? They’ve got nothing on Grandma—or Ginny, as it turns out.

It was 1958, and Ginny’s parents had been dead for less than a year. The boom had finally begun to level off, and there were fewer strange men around town, fewer roughnecks and roustabouts driving in to spend their paychecks and raise hell, but Ginny was still young enough to hold her grandma’s hand for no particular reason, just because. The two of them were making their way to the drugstore, cutting across the lawn at City Hall on their weekly sojourn to pick up her granddaddy’s pills and maybe a licorice whip for Ginny. It was early summer and the wind held still for a few minutes, here and there, the sun bestowing just the right amount of warmth on their faces when they stopped to watch the light shine through the diaphanous, narrow leaves of the town’s pecan trees. Until they nearly tripped over her, they did not see the woman curled up in the grass, sleeping like an old copperhead.

Ginny remembers it like this: She had sniffed at the air, recognizing the scent of piss and whiskey. She stared at the lady’s naked feet. Bright red polish flaked off her toenails, and her skirt hem rested above two skinned knees. Her bony clavicle rose and fell, and a thin scar on her neck reminded Ginny of the state map hanging on the wall in her first-grade classroom. Something about that long mark made Ginny want to wake her up and tell her, Lady, you got a scar in the shape of the Sabine River on your neck. It’s wonderful. But Ginny’s grandma squeezed her hand tight and jerked her away from the woman, her lips rucked up and pressed tightly together. Well, she said, that one’s been rode hard and put up wet one too many times.

For days, Ginny worked hard to figure out the meaning of those words. Sometimes she liked to imagine the lady saddled and thirsty, her skirt wrinkling beneath a wool blanket, a bit clenched in her teeth, and sweat streaming between her eyes as some old rancher rode her across the oil patch. Other times, Ginny thought about the way the woman had lain curled beneath the pecan tree, her toenails painted the exact red of the little wagon that Ginny hauled around the yard. The quickness with which her grandma had jerked her away from the woman was not so different from the way she yanked Ginny out of her granddaddy’s barn when a bull started climbing up on one of the cows.

And if Grandma’s hands hadn’t been so full, if she hadn’t had it up to here most days, with Ginny and dust and scrubbing the crude oil out of her husband’s shirts, Ginny might have asked her why she said that. But she stayed quiet about it, and she sometimes thought about those two skinned knees, the scar that looked like the Sabine River, its meandering path across the woman’s throat as she slept in the shade of a pecan tree. The woman had been beautiful to Ginny. She still is.

A few miles past the Slaughter Field, the derricks and pumpjacks give way to empty desert. On the other side of Pecos, the road begins to rise and fall. The horizon goes jagged, and the land turns ruddy and uneven. How lonely it is out there. How lovely.

Ginny keeps both hands on the wheel, her eyes shifting back and forth between the temperature gauge and the road ahead. She stops for gas in Van Horn, sitting in her car with her fingers wrapped around the steering wheel while the attendant fills the tank and washes the windows. Cigarette dangling from his lips, he checks the tire pressure and asks if she needs anything more. His coveralls are the same gray as Debra Ann’s eyes, and there is a small oval Gulf Oil patch on his breast pocket. No thank you, she says and hands him five dollars.

He points to her back seat. You forgot to return your library book before you left town. Ginny twists around to see Art in America surrounded by candy bar wrappers and one of Debra Ann’s graded spelling tests, the first two words canceled and trespassing, both misspelled.

At the stockyards outside of El Paso, she rolls the window up tight, her eyes and skin burning when the stench of methane gas seeps through the vents. She is ten miles from the New Mexico border, the farthest she has ever been from home.

Beauty! Beauty is not for people like us, her grandma said when Ginny tried to explain why she liked to sit and look at pictures in the afternoons. You’d do better paying attention to what’s right in front of you, the old woman said. If you wanted to spend your life thinking about such things, you should have thought of that before—or been born someplace else. And maybe that’s true, but it seems like a high price to pay, and maybe Ginny’s not willing to make the trade—the world or her daughter—because it’s clear she can’t have both.

When the fan belt finally snaps on the other side of Las Cruces, Ginny’s car shudders to the highway shoulder. She gets out of the car and watches the moon rise over the desert like a broken carnelian, and such has been her fear and grief and longing that, for many years, she will not remember the man who pulled up behind her car, his truck wheels grinding against the caliche-covered highway shoulder. She will not remember the words on the side of his truck—Garza & O’Brien, Tow & Repair—or that he fetched his toolbox from his truck and replaced the belt on the spot while she leaned against the trunk and looked at the stars, and wept without making a sound. And she will not remember what he said, when Ginny tried to give him a few dollars. Young lady, I can’t take your money. Pues, good luck.

She will have seen a thousand miles of sky before she is finally able to stop moving. Flagstaff, Reno, one short and sorry stint in Albuquerque that she tries hard to forget. Weeks and months sleeping in her car after a day spent cleaning houses, or a night waiting tables. She will drive through the Sonoran Desert, its washes and ravines disappearing into box canyons, she will sit at the edge of a meadow just above the Mogollon Rim, newly covered with snow. The road that leads away is full of switchbacks so tight Ginny has to stop and back up, and hope that no one comes around the corner before she can make the curve.

There will be a bar in Reno, where the same old lady shows up every night at nine o’clock and stays until close, her lips creased with lipstick, fingernails the color of blood, her smile as fierce and hard and true as the face Ginny sees in the mirror, most mornings. All of this is beautiful to her—the sky and sea, addicts and old ladies, musicians playing in subway stations, museums at the end of the line. She will see bridges over- come by fog, and sylvan forests teeming and dark and full of hidden water. Every place has a different kind of sky, it turns out, and much of this earth is not nearly as brown and flat as Odessa, Texas. All this wild, green beauty and still, always, a hole in her heart the size of a little girl’s fist. Ginny will drive that Pontiac into the ground and grieve for it when it’s gone. Never, she thinks, will I love a man the way I loved that car. And when people she meets along the way wonder about her, when they try to know her—some of them will love her, and she will love some of them, but never as much as the daughter who grows taller every day, without her—when they ask what’s your story or where are you from, Ginny never knows quite what to say. Each time, she just packs up her car and drives away.

**

Elizabeth Wetmore is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her fiction has appeared in Epoch, Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Baltimore Review, Crab Orchard Review, Iowa Review, and other literary journals. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and two fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, as well as a grant from the Barbara Deming Foundation. She was also a Rona Jaffe Scholar in Fiction at Bread Loaf and a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony, and one of six Writers in Residence at Hedgebrook. A native of West Texas, she lives and works in Chicago. Valentine is her first novel.

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Music by Catlofe

Excerpt from In Our Other Lives by Theodore Wheeler

Elisabeth Holland sensed there was bad news the same as she had at other times—she woke early, started coffee, set out her scrubs, waited for the phone to ring—but this morning something was different in the way her internal organs were arranged. The world had shifted underneath her while she was asleep. Elisabeth felt it on the horizon. The sun rising, yes, but also that something vital had changed inside her and out.

This time it was her mother who called to tell the news.

—Did you see?

—See what?

—He’s alive. They found him.

Elisabeth continued fitting the sleeve into the percolator and added three spoons of dry grounds from the canister. The phone was on speaker, on the counter, while her mother rushed to tell what had happened. The call was something Elisabeth must have dreamed about dozens of times, hundreds of times; and it was, she admitted this freely to a woman she worked with at the hospital, that she daydreamed all the time that someone she’d lost would return to her. And in this moment—her mother rambling, repeating the same words, they found him, and Elisabeth unsure who was found and who had done the finding—she questioned if she was woman enough to handle the news she’d so long hoped to hear, or if the news would overwhelm her.

—Is it going to be okay?

—Oh, honey. I don’t know. Sometimes things happen for reasons we can’t understand.

—Don’t say it’s God’s plan. I’ll hang up if you say that.

Elisabeth forgot about the coffee to rush across her apartment and turn on the TV, then she saw. Tyler in a glitching, wavy video, a ten-second clip looped on cable news. The title read: “Missing American Found; Turncoat?” The cable-news anchor verified that the man’s identity had only just then been confirmed by the government and that the man in the video was Tyler Ahls. Elisabeth knew the man in the video was Tyler Ahls. Her kid brother, missing in Pakistan nine months by then, supposedly on a missionary trip. Under a doppa cap and patchy beard, Tyler: the block shape of his head, his stringy ginger hair falling long down the sides of his skull. His gray eyes, his gaze slightly diverted, always, because he was timid.

—It’s Tyler.

—Yes! Tyler!

There would be thousands of questions to ask and answer because of that video of Tyler Ahls in an Afghani cave. But Elisabeth didn’t worry about all that. In this moment of simultaneous joy and dread, Elisabeth felt sorry for herself. She hung up the phone and returned to brewing coffee as the weight of her mysteries puzzled in new design on her shoulders. That she married and lost love young. That she only briefly was a mother before that too escaped her, that her son died, two months old, and she’d lived alone since then. That her brother, her parents—she’d never known what exactly to think about them. She watched the drips drop into the pot, trying to grasp what that video was going to mean for her family, for her parents and for Tyler. If Tyler really was alive, for one thing, and if he could ever come home; and if it would have, in fact, been better if he died hiking, like they believed he had while evangelizing in Pakistan, instead of being in the hands of terrorists; or if he was one of them. (She hadn’t yet seen the ransom video of Tyler, the curious demands he made, so she didn’t understand why the newscasters wondered if he was a turncoat.) Elisabeth struggled to keep her mind on anything. She thought of her husband. Maybe it was wrong of her, but when her mother called and said they found him, Elisabeth thought, she’d hoped, it was her husband who’d been found. Her husband (Nick Holland) who was also missing, for three years by then. Nick ran off on his own volition and nobody was looking for him. Elisabeth didn’t know this at the time (how could she?) but Nick would show up in Omaha not long after this morning.

Once the pot was brewed, she poured herself a cup, stirred in two spoons of sugar, but didn’t sip. The aroma made her gag. She poured the entire pot into the sink, unthinking, washed it away with clean water from the tap, then took a Coke from the fridge because she needed something sweet. She sat at the table and tried to put herself in the right frame of mind to go into the hospital where she was a nurse. She emptied the can in a few swallows. The taste, the sugar, was what she was thirsty for, so she opened a second can.

It was strange to have Nick Holland drop into her mind—when her mother said they found him. What Elisabeth thought of, that moment, was Nick holding their baby. The look on his face, that sly, almost unwitting smile, Nick so pleased with whatever joke he was keeping to himself—because her mother had put his son in a silk baptismal gown, what he’d called a dress. She and Nick lived in a one-bedroom ground-floor in Chicago then. Her dad poking around, an armchair flipped over on its top so he could fix where a spindle unglued out from its joint. Her mom practically pacing, manic, trying to explain the historical significance, the family lore, trying to explain the three generations of the pretty white gown she brought to put on Caleb.

Nick was the one who dressed the baby in the gown, who slid white silk over newborn head and tightened the pleats with a sash. All with Deb Ahls trying to interfere over his shoulder, all without the baby crying.

Elisabeth’s parents, her mother especially, weren’t comfortable with the fact that Nick had no religion. That he was godless, as they called it. Elisabeth even concealed how Nick was never baptized. Of course he was, Elisabeth lied, on the phone to her parents when she called to tell them she’d married Nick. Everybody in Nebraska is baptized, which is where Nick came from. This had to be the reason the Ahls rushed down to Chicago the instant Caleb was born, Elisabeth’s mother clutching the paperboard box that held the silk gown like it was a religious artifact, like it was the Shroud of Turin she dug out of their attic in Wisconsin. Already the Ahls didn’t like Nick—he was eight years older than their daughter; she was only twenty-three when she married him—and his godlessness made this gap harder to stomach. Still, couldn’t they have left that gown in the car?

Nick’s bemusement at the situation delighted Elisabeth. He was quietly perplexed as he listened to Deb Ahls go on about sacraments—baptism, reconciliation, etc., etc. Nick strolled to the window with the baby to look where a guy was trying to tip a Chevy Metro over a snowbank without getting high-centered. City plows had barricaded in all the cars on the block, so Nick watched the sedan rock and its tires sink into the snow as he fingered the pleats and bleached lace that brocaded Caleb’s chest. This was the Nick Holland that Elisabeth loved. Cowboy Nick, tall and lean, with a scuzzy beard. Exhaustion bowed his shoulders, his back, because he returned to the warehouse where he worked only a day after the baby was born. He didn’t have to do that, but that’s how he was—how I was raised, he’d say, to remind Elisabeth that he came from hard workers, farmers, that he’d risen before the sun most every day as a teenager, or so he claimed. Nick, who that day, unbathed in blue jeans and plain white tee, barefoot, at half past noon on a Thursday, woke only because company was at the door. Of course, the baby had disordered his hours—why shouldn’t he sleep when he had the chance?—and in Chicago he always worked nights.

It wasn’t clear to Elisabeth why she remembered Nick this way. His glancing over his shoulder at her, Caleb asleep in his arms all of a sudden. “Well,” he said, looking at Elisabeth but speaking to her mother, “we’re not running out the door right this minute to dunk him in holy water, if that’s what you expect.”

With the same sure hand, Nick slipped Caleb out of the gown and swaddled him in swaddling and set the baby in the bassinet without waking him.

How did a guy like him know how to do a thing like that? Nick claimed he never even held a baby until the OB put Caleb in his arms in the delivery room. Elisabeth’s legs still spread in the stirrups and there’s Nick with his son in his arms; Nick joyous, laughing, hair in his eyes, an infant cradled in his elbow. Was that a natural component of the cogs that made Nick Holland tick? Dusty good looks, a strong mind for trivial knowledge, a soft and assured touch with infants? And if this was so, this last component, then why did Nick run off and leave her and the baby so soon after that day?

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Theodore Wheeler is author of the novels In Our Other Lives (Little A, 2020) and Kings of Broken Things (Little A, 2017). Winner of a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, he covers a civil-law and politics beat for a national news service, co-directs Omaha Lit Fest, and sidelines as a bookseller for the Dundee Book Company roving book cart, one of the world’s smallest bookstores.

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Music by Catlofe

The following excerpt is from Days of Distraction © 2020 by Alexandra Chang, used with permission by Ecco/HarperCollins.

Days of Distraction

The China I remember most is like this:

The apartment in Pudong. The tadpoles had sprouted legs, which meant they needed to be tossed. My sister and I poured them into the alley gutter, crying for the lost swimmers. There were too many. They drained away with the waste.

A woman held her baby, her arms outstretched, pleading and repeating to those who passed: Please take her. My mother watched from the window five stories up. She petted my brother’s head and said, Would you like a little sister today?

In summer, the air was thick and heavy, the dragonflies flew low by our thighs. It was enough to smother the wails of our losses. The alley was empty of people at night.

**

Back then, I didn’t understand the reasons for either—our departure or his staying put. For years, my mom said it was because she missed home and family. My dad said it was because he had to take care of things and to work. When we returned, he no longer had a car repair shop and we no longer had a house. They took us to an unknown town, Davis, and said here’s where we’ll live. We accepted because we had no choice. The explanations and stories shifted based on time and speaker. Money. Business mistakes. Greedy relatives. Lawsuits. Separation. Stress. Her mistakes. His mistakes. I still don’t know what truly happened, but at this point, does the truth really matter.

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As for Davis, the beginning was not great. The sixth grade teacher introduced me as an immigrant from China. Though it was not entirely true, neither was it entirely false. I didn’t correct her. My sister and brother were placed into ESL classes until they could distinguish between “a stove” and “an oven,” though our mom never used the latter. The teachers made them name never-eaten dishes on a cartoon Thanksgiving table. I seemed to escape the classes out of age and luck, but none of us could escape Davis. It reminded me of the movie Pleasantville, of that 1950s TV town Tobey Maguire’s character escapes to. A made-up place in a made-up movie, far removed from my experience. I cried often in the first weeks; I wanted to go back—to San Francisco, or even China seemed like a better option at times. I fell asleep fantasizing about what life would have been like somewhere else.

**

One of my junior high teachers once said in class, Davis is full of the kind of liberals who claim they want to make the world a better place, but who will fight to the death to prevent a homeless shelter from being built in their neighborhood.

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Davis, too, was the place of my family’s tectonic shifts. Divorce. Poverty. Domestic disputes. Charged, simple terms I hated, still hate, to use to describe those days. But I’m getting used to them. Both their ability to quickly summarize and their inability to cap- ture beyond a shallow essence.

**

But Davis is where I met and found J, who is listening intently to this story of his. Fear is primal. Fear sells. That was my mantra. “Fear sells.”

I hit pause on the phone. “What’s this guy talking about? What’s happening now in the book?”

“He’s selling a vaccine,” he says.

“For what?”

“For—wait, do you really want to know? Should I explain everything you’ve missed? Are you going to listen now?”

“Uh . . .” I think for a while. “No, I guess not. It only sounded interesting for a second.”

“It is interesting! I wish you’d stay awake and listen to it with me.”

“No, no, it’s okay. I don’t want to.” I press play again and go back to staring out the window or sleeping.

**

In Montana there are big mountains and fast-driving semis. I remember something a friend who grew up in the countryside once told me: If you want to fit in with rural people, wear camo. So much of it in Montana. At a highway rest stop we see a family of close to a dozen, various ages, each wearing at least one piece of camo. A teenage girl with her ponytail looped out the back of a camo baseball cap. A little boy in camo shorts. One man in a camo T-shirt, another in a camo button-up. A woman in a camo zip-up jacket. An old man and woman—grandparents—in matching camo sweatpants, and so on.

There are two opposing reasons animals in the wild have camouflaging abilities, a pop-science article tells me. One is to go unnoticed while hunting. The other is to hide in order to avoid being caught. When a tawny frogmouth senses danger, it fluffs out its feathers, freezes, and looks like a broken tree branch. Aristotle long ago noticed that the octopus “seeks its prey by changing its colour as to render it like the colour of the stones adjacent to it.”

**

As we travel deeper into the country, how best to hide myself? Will J’s presence provide a sufficient cloak? Where and when and how will who or what come out to attack?

**

He turns twenty-six. We celebrate at what looks like the fanciest restaurant in Butte. A group of men in suits sit at the table behind us, talking about regulations and meetings and numbers. There is thin green carpeting throughout. The candles on the table are fake.

J says he has a fantasy about us one day retiring to the Montana mountains. He grew to love the area after his family’s vacations here during his childhood. All day they hiked, swam, and fished. All activities I am not wholly against. But I can’t imagine living in Montana, at all, ever. Or, rather, I strongly dislike my imagination of living in Montana.

“I want to say nice things because it’s your birthday, but I’m never living in Montana.”

“Why not?”

“How many Asians do you think there are? Like none?”

He looks it up on his phone. “Says here that Asians make up zero-point-six percent of the population. So no, I guess it wouldn’t be that fun for you.”

“Zero. Point. Six.” I glance over at the men eating behind us. “And you don’t like the outdoors much, either.”

“It’s not the outdoors that are the main problem, although yes. I’m not in love with this whole camping, living-on-the-ground thing—but it’s cheaper for the trip, so whatever.”

**

Another drawback: tent sex needs to be very quiet so as not to disturb neighboring tent sleepers. But all of these camping materials— what were they thinking?—with the smallest of movements, the stuff produces the loudest, scratchiest noises.

**

I know this much about driving: It is not okay to close your eyes while on the highway, or under any circumstance, really, but I’m not behind the wheel, so the rule need not apply.

**

We don’t only date white men and women. But we are only dating white men and women right now. My sister is with a tall man with fluffy brown hair and a significant nose. My brother is “talking to” a rock climber with cropped blond hair. They are both young, so I think maybe they might not actually end up with a white person. Me, on the other hand, I have been with J for my entire adult life, and here I am in this car, so it seems that I will end up with him, a white man. J does not like that, again, I’m pointing this out.

“It’s as if being white is the one thing that defines me,” he says. “Well, it’s definitely a big part of what defines you,” I say.

**

He used to wear a shirt that had a stylized logo of the words stop racism! printed on the chest. I told him to stop wearing it. It made me very uncomfortable to be seen with him when he was wearing the shirt, and even if I was not with him, the thought of him being seen in that shirt at all made me uneasy. I couldn’t explain why and I still can’t quite explain it. Maybe I was worried that people would think he was with me because he was trying to stop racism? Maybe I was worried he was actually dating me to stop racism? Maybe it had to do with me knowing he would never stop racism by wearing a shirt that said stop racism!? Anyway, he can’t wear the shirt anymore because I threw it out when we moved in together. The act was a relief at the time. Now I feel mildly guilty for tossing something he liked, and with not at all a bad message.

**

It’s not that I didn’t think of our races when we first got together. Or haven’t thought of our races since. Of course I did and have. At first they were ghostly thoughts. Really, he wants me? How could this be? Why not her or her or her? Or is it because I’m—so ghostly was that thought it could not be completed. Those weren’t our problems. He wasn’t like that. We fell in love like young people do for the first time—fast, reckless, absolutely, and hard. But unlike most, we remained in love. In college, I made a list of all the couples we knew who believed they would stay together. I crossed each one off after they broke up. We are the last ones left.

When we talked about race, we did so mostly from a distance or as a joke, like something that could not touch the depths of this combined entity that was “us.” But I know we do not and cannot exist outside of it. I know I am guilty of avoiding, or not complet- ing, the conversations. That might still be our problem.

**

From an OkCupid FAQ:

Q: Are you saying that because I prefer to date [whatever race], I’m a racist?

On an individual level, a person can’t really control who turns them on—and almost everyone has a “type,” one way or another. But I do think the trend—that fact that race is a sexual factor for so many individuals, and in such a consistent way—says something about race’s role in our society. . . .

. . . you can actually look at people who’ve combined “white” with another racial description. Adding “whiteness” always helps your rating!

**

My sister once dated a ginger. A real serious ginger, bright orange hair and skin a landscape of freckles. J’s mom saw her and her boy- friend walking downtown together in our hometown when they’d come back for a winter break. After spotting them, she called J and said, “Those girls love gingers!” When he told me this, I responded, “You’re not a ginger, are you? You’re just very pale.”

**

Alexandra Chang is from Northern California. She currently lives in upstate New York with her husband and their dog and cat. Days of Distraction is her first book. 

**

Music by CatLofe

The following is excerpted from Starling Days by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, published April 2020 by The Overlook Press/ABRAMS. Copyright © 2020 Rowan Hisayo Buchanan. All rights reserved.

Starling Days

August

She wasn’t expecting the bridge to shudder. It was too big for trembling. Cars hissed from New York to New Jersey over its wide back. That August had been hot, 96° Fahrenheit hot. Heat softened the dollar bills and clung to the quarters and dimes that passed from sticky hand to sticky hand.

It was night and the air had cooled but humidity still hung in a red fog in Mina’s lungs. Wind galloped over the Hudson, pummeling the city with airy hooves. The bridge shifted, the pylons swayed, and Mina closed her eyes to better feel her bones judder. Even her teeth shook. The day’s sweat shivered between her bare shoulder blades. The tank top felt too thin, and the down on her arms rose. She took a step forward along the bridge. The tender spots between her big and index toes were sore from too many days in flip-flops. She took the sandals off. They swung from her fingers as she walked. Under her feet, the rough cement was warm. She wondered about the people driving their shadowy cars. Were they leaving over-air-conditioned offices, or bars cooled by the thwack of ceiling fans? Were they going home to empty condos,

or daughters tucked under dinosaur quilts?

The bridge was decked out in blue lights, like a Christmas tree, like those monochrome ones shopping malls put up. Still, it was beautiful. Mina readied her phone to take a picture. She watched the granulated night appear onscreen. Perhaps her hands wobbled, because the photo was a blur. It was nothing she could send Oscar. But she wasn’t sure it was a good idea to send him pictures. Not tonight.

She stopped in the middle of the bridge. Hello, Manhattan. Downriver, apartment blocks spiked upwards. She couldn’t see Queens and the walk-up apartment building she’d grown up inside. Nor could she see the Park Slope apartment, in which Oscar was working late. He’d have a mug on his desk, the coffee gone cold hours ago. The photo of her would be propped up behind his computer. The sparkly stress ball she’d bought him years ago as a joke gift would rest at his wrist. Every hour or so he’d roll it between his palms. When he was working, he didn’t notice time. She was sure he wouldn’t yet be worried. She’d said she was meeting some friends after the tutoring gig. He didn’t know she’d texted the group that she was feeling unwell and would miss movie night. He wouldn’t expect her for at least two hours. No one was expecting her. She was unwitnessed. She lifted her face to the breeze.

The river was as dark as poured tarmac. They said that when a body fell onto water from this height, it was like hitting the sidewalk. The Golden Gate had nets to stop jumpers. She imag- ined the feeling of a rope cutting into arms and legs. Your body would flop, like a fish. How long did they have to lie there before someone scooped them out? There was nothing like that here. People said that drowning was a good death, that the tiny alveoli of the lungs filled like a thousand water balloons.

She lifted one purple flip-flop and dropped it over the water. She didn’t hear it hit. The shape simply vanished into the black shadow.

That was when the lights got brighter and the voice, male and certain, lobbed into her ears. 

“Ma’am, step away from the rail.”

The police car’s lights flashed blue and white and red. Once she’d had an ice-pop those colors and the sugary water had pooled behind her teeth.

“Ma’am, step away from the rail.”

“Good evening, Officer. Have I done something wrong?” Mina asked.

“Please get into the car,” he said. There were two of them. The other was younger and he was speaking into a radio. It was hard to make out his words over the wind and traffic. Was he talking about her?

“This is a public walkway,” Mina said. “It was open. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Ma’am, get into the car.”

“I don’t want to get into the car. Look, I was just getting some air. I was thinking. I’ll go home now.”

“Ma’am, don’t make me come over there.”

Mina had never been in a police car. She’d read once that the back doors only open from the outside. Who knew what would happen if she got into the car?

The window was rolled down and the cop stuck his head out.

There was a lump on his upper lip, a pimple perhaps. “Where are your shoes?”

“It’s hot out,” she said. “Where are your shoes?”

“I don’t want to tell you about my shoes,” she said. “I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m an American citizen.”

“Ma’am, where are your shoes?”

She lifted up the single flip-flop she had left. “The other one broke,” she said.

Behind him, other cars continued into the night. Did they even notice her standing in the dark, a small woman with bare legs and feet? She was aware of the bluing bruise she’d caught banging her knee on the subway door. In the shower that morning, she’d skipped shaving her legs. In the beam of his headlamps, could he see hairs standing up in splinters?

“Ma’am, I really need you to get into the car. I can’t leave you here. What if something happened to you?” In his voice, she heard the insinuation that normal women, innocent women, didn’t walk alone on bridges at night.

“I’m fine,” she said.

Mina knew her stubby ponytail was frizzy. Bleaching black to Marilyn Monroe–blonde had taken four rounds of peroxide. Now it stood up in breaking strands. If she’d conditioned it, would this cop think she was sane? If she’d blow-dried it, would he have let her go home? And, of course, there were the tattoos twining up her arms.

“We can talk about it in the car,” he said. His shadowed friend was bent over the radio, lips to the black box.

Mina was tired. It was the heat, or perhaps the wind. So she got into the car. The seat was smooth. Someone must’ve chosen the fabric specially. This must be wipeable and disinfectable. People probably spat on this seat. They probably pissed on purpose and by mistake. Between the front and back seats was a grille. She would not be able to reach out to touch the curve of the cop’s ear or straighten his blue collar. The flip-flop lay across her knees.

The cops wanted to know her name, address, phone number and Social Security. She gave them.

“We’re taking you to Mount Sinai,” said the cop.

“I was just going for a walk, clearing my head. I don’t need to be in a hospital. I was just clearing my head.”

Damn. Repeating yourself was a habit of the guilty. Mina tried to slow her breath.

“See it from my point of view,” he said. “You’re walking alone on the bridge at night. I can’t let you out. I don’t know what would happen.”

Only then did she understand that they must do this every night, drive back and forth across the bridge looking for people like her.

“I have to go to work tomorrow,” she said. “My husband will want to know where I am. Please, please, just let me go to the subway.”

“We can’t do that, ma’am.”

The car left the bridge and fell back into Manhattan. She kept telling them she wasn’t trying to cause trouble. She said it so many times that the word “trouble” began to sound like “burble” or “bubble.” Heat rose in her eyes. She pushed the water off her face.

Finally, they agreed that she could call her husband, and they would go to the paramedics parked near the bridge. If the para- medics said she was okay, she could go home.

“Oscar,” she said. “Oscar, I need you to come get me. They won’t let me leave until you come get me.”

**

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is the author of Harmless Like You—the winner of The Authors’ Club First Novel Award and a Betty Trask Award. It was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and an NPR 2017 Great Read. Her second novel, Starling Days, was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award. She is the editor of the Go Home! anthology. Her short work has appeared in Granta, The Atlantic, and The Rumpus, among other places.

The following excerpt from Lakewood by Megan Giddings is reprinted courtesy of HarperOne/Amistad Books:

Lakewood

Lena’s grandmother’s final instructions were that the funeral should be scheduled for 11 a.m. but would start at 11:17 when everyone would be there and seated. Deziree, if she was well, would give one of the eulogies, and at the luncheon, Lena would give presents and letters to Miss Toni’s closest friends and tell them one last time how special they were to her. Anyone who was still alive and didn’t attend, Lena would send letters to them within a week. And by 8 p.m., Deziree and Lena should be at the casino across town, the one with the good buffet.

Still in her black dress and high heels, Lena listened to the slot machine’s’ songs, their rhythms and chimes, the excited harmony of multiple machines loudly announcing a winner. Her mother, Deziree, was talking to a few of the bouncers and waitresses, accepting their condolences, nodding as one said, “I still can’t believe it. Miss Toni. Jesus. I’m thirty and she was in better shape than me.” And a year ago, that had been true. “She was more alive than most people I know.” Lena nodded.

The day before she’d died, the three of them were in the hospital room, and her grandmother had said, “What I wouldn’t give for one more June day.” She wanted to talk with her friends on the porch, eat a bowl of raspberries with whipped cream on top, grill out, and stay up late playing cards with the two of them. And the weather would be warm, not hot. Big cloud, blue sky weather. Lena had excused herself, went to get tea, and hoped that at the end of her own life, she would only want one more good, but not special, day. 

“Y’all are in my prayers.”

“Thank you,” Lena and Deziree said in unison. The two of them were so used to hearing variations of that, the response was now automatic.

Inside the casino, they sowed coins into Cleopatra slot machines. After losing five times in a row, Lena stopped and cashed out. Deziree kept going. Her face was illuminated pink and blue by the machine and it made the tear stains on her cheeks visible again.

“Stop being so rude,” Deziree muttered to the machine after losing a second time.

Lena shut her eyes. It was the first time all day the two of them had been alone, where she didn’t feel like she had to look brave or grateful or think about anyone else’s feelings. She was saturated with the day. Her grandmother’s face in the casket, so still—Lena could only look at it for a few seconds before having to look instead at the pink carpet of the church floor, the white flowers, or her own manicure, gray. Her mother’s voice, so steady, as she spoke about Miss Toni. Watching her and trying to focus on the speech, the goodbyes, rather than worrying every time her mom’s hands shook, every time she stumbled a little bit on a word, that another flare-up was about to start. The mixture of flowers, mildew, and heavy perfume that only really smelled like perfume—not vanilla or lilies like the bottles probably said—and roast chicken in the church basement.

“I’m exhausted,” Lena said. 

“Feelings? Or do you need to change your shoes? Or?”

“Everything.”

“We promised her this.”

“I know.”

Lena watched as Deziree went up 10, down 20, up 30. She liked the color blue they used for the scarabs. The dopey cats wearing hats. How the game designers had thrown in some fancy English letters rather than try to do all hieroglyphics. How there was no way for her to understand how to win the game—it seemed to be all great robotic whims.

A pack of Miss Toni’s friends turned the corner and descended on them. They were in casual clothes, silky pants and tracksuits, but still stunk of the thick perfumes they probably spritzed on every time they dressed up. “Here you girls are.”

“Did she tell you all to come here too?” 

One squeezed Lena’s left shoulder. The other flicked something off her right arm. Another asked Deziree how she was feeling, did she need anything? And Lena, how was she keeping up with classes? College alone is a lot. I can’t imagine being so young.

“Everything is going good at school. All of the professors were really nice and understanding—”

“Do you all have things to eat?”

The kindness was suffocating. So many casseroles, so many cards, so many people dropping by, so many thinking-of-yous. Lena wanted to be good and kind. And she was grateful that so many people loved her grandma. But it was also exhausting to have so many people looking into her face, looking at the parts of it and trying to find Miss Toni in it. 

A waitress carrying a tray squeezed in among them and cleared her throat. “Courtesy of Miss Toni.” She passed two Dark & Stormys to Lena and Deziree. The waitress paused, her face crumpled, and she fled.

“Was she at the funeral?” Lena asked.

“Maybe? In the back?” Deziree held her Dark & Stormy up, clinked it against Lena’s. “Cheers.”

The women stayed around them, chitchatting about how Toni had done such a great job raising them both, as if Deziree wasn’t going to turn 43 that year. Lena turned back to Deziree’s screen: She was up 65 dollars now. 

“I’ll be right back,” Lena said. She walked to the nearest bathroom, taking her drink with her. She sat in the stall farthest from the door. Took the deepest breath she could, then let it out slowly. Contorted her face into different expressions—happy, anguished, I’m-going-to-get-you-bitch—and took a long drink. There were two extra lime slices in it like her grandmother always ordered. How many Dark & Stormys do I have to have, she wondered, to feel like you’re here with us? A song about being so much in desire for someone that you felt like you had burst into flames was leaking through the speakers in the ceiling.

“Lena?” Her mother screamed loudly.

She finished her drink, set the glass on the floor, and went out to Deziree. 

“Everything okay?” Lena asked. The mirror gave a full view of the back of her mother’s head—it looked as if she had been pulling on her hair. Her black bra straps poked out. Her eyes were bloodshot, her fingers trembling. It was hard to tell whether it was because of the poor bathroom lighting or because of illness, but Deziree’s skin was now sallow. 

“We can go home.” Lena said, smoothing her mother’s hair and adjusting the straps back into place. She watched her hands and mouth for tremors, but they were still. Deziree’s dark lipstick was smudged, but still looked pretty good.

“I lost it all,” Deziree said. They paused for a moment, and both laughed.

Lena coughed when she was finished. She couldn’t help asking, “You took your medicine today, right?”

“I wouldn’t have been able to do anything today without it.”

They left the bathroom and headed to Miss Toni’s favorite blackjack dealer. When he noticed them, he signaled a waitress, who brought over two more Dark & Stormys. “May you have Toni’s luck tonight,” he said. Then, with a laugh, “Please don’t have her luck. I need a job.”

They smiled at each other, then did what they always did—snapped their fingers for luck and clasped hands. One of the first things Lena could remember her grandma teaching her was blackjack. The game’s rules, but also things like remembering—as with most individual sports—that it was also a game you mostly played against yourself. You had to be confident, engaged, patient. Don’t allow yourself to be polluted by the dealer’s silence or the chitchat of the people around you.

Lena leaned forward a little. Focused on counting and paying attention to everyone’s cards, watching the dealer’s hands and eyes, looking for tells. She sipped her drink slowly, at a rate fast enough to make her feet ache a little less, but not enough to feel too bold. And when she hit blackjack for the first time, she automatically turned to the right, where her grandmother might be, before quickly turning and squeezing Deziree’s hands with delight. 

An hour later and two hundred dollars richer—an amount Miss Toni would have called “fine”—they shimmied and danced their way over to the buffet to eat blueberry-bacon gelato and lobster and scrambled eggs. As they waited to get severed coffee, Deziree kept putting one hand over her forehead and rubbing the spot between her eyebrows. “Don’t worry,” she kept saying. 

Deziree sagged down, her head and forearms resting on the table. She didn’t notice the purple gelato drip pattern that she was creating on the front of her dress.

Lena asked the waitress for a double Americano. 

“She drunk?” the waitress asked. She was young, probably a college student. Hair dyed purple, a nose ring. She had also been at the funeral, Lena realized. 

“Nah. She good.” 

“This is the best I’ve felt in days.” Deziree was crumpling into illness, grief, exhaustion. Her voice came out slurred. 

“She gonna need a chair?”

Lena took off her own left shoe beneath the table and rubbed her toes hard. “We’ll be out of here in ten, I promise. She’s fine.”

***

Stumbling into their living room, Deziree dumped the contents of her purse on the floor. Dollars, credit cards, lipstick, a mint that looked as if it had already been sucked on and then put back in the cellophane wrap, coins scattered across the wood floors. Deziree looked at the mess for a moment, then fell. 

Lena rushed to her side. Her mom propped herself up.

“Smile at me,” Lena said. “I’m fine.”

“Come on. We both know you didn’t drink that much.”

Deziree gritted her teeth. Lena raised her eyebrows. Deziree rolled her eyes and did a big fake grin.

Lena had her mother lift her arms and repeat the phrase, “Pancakes are better with bananas in them.” 

“They said we had to do this every time you fall.” 

“You sound just like her.”

Deziree sat up and went to her bedroom. When she returned, she was holding a large envelope that was stuffed to the limits. She tossed it onto Lena’s stomach.

“Can we do this later today?”

But her mother was already in the kitchen, opening drawers and rifling through cabinets as if she had stored secrets among the plates and glasses. Inside the envelope were bills. Insurance statements that looked as if they were all disagreeing with each other about the amount of coverage. Folded-over invoices from the cemetery, the funeral home. Electric and water bills. Some receipts. Deziree came back holding more bills.

“Have any of these been paid?”

“I don’t know.”

Deziree stooped over the coffee table. She pulled more bills between the magazines. It felt like an absurd magic trick. 

Lena rubbed her eyes and the remnants of her mascara stained her fingertips. She made herself sit up straight. 

“There’s more bills I can pull up on my phone.”

Lena felt all the aftershocks of no sleep, the stress of the past months, and now this. She wanted to go to bed and sleep for three days. Instead, she went to the kitchen, found the least green banana she could, poured a glass of water, and pulled out her mom’s pillbox. There were only enough pills in the box until Saturday.

“I’m sorry, Biscuit—” her mom began. Lena handed everything over. “Take these.” Her mom’s eyes were watering. Lena made her mouth soft, adjusted her posture. “I’m not mad, I’m just tired.”

“But—” 

“This day has been too long for us to have this conversation right now.” She watched her mother carefully, making sure she swallowed her pills, ate at least half of the banana, drank all the water. Lena squeezed her mother’s hands when they were free, hoping the gesture was reassuring. “Get some sleep and we’ll talk about this in the afternoon.”

Deziree stood up and went to her room. Lena picked up the bills and carried them out to the kitchen table. She organized them into categories: house, medical-Mom, funeral, medical-Grandma. Then she pulled out a pen and her notebook from her backpack and flipped to her current to-do list: an astronomy test the next day that she still hadn’t studied enough for, a three-hour shift at her work-study job that night, Spanish conversation lunch about going shopping where she was supposed to lead a conversation entirely in Spanish. Thank-you letters to write. Coordinating with Miss Shaunté about Deziree’s home health care schedule. She needed to understand the math to calculate a star’s gravity and its effect on everything around it while it was still living. Figure out summer work.

Lena tapped the pile of bills with her pen, flipped the page, and started a brand-new list.

**

Megan Giddings is a fiction editor at The Offing, a winner of the Whiting Literary Magazine Prize, and a features editor at The Rumpus. She is the recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant for feminist fiction. Her short stories have been published in Black Warrior Review, Gulf Coast, and The Iowa Review. Megan holds degrees from the University of Michigan and Indiana University. She lives in Indiana. Lakewood is her first novel.

**

Music by Catlofe

The following excerpt from The Everlasting, Copyright © 2020, by Katy Simpson Smith, is reprinted here with permission of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers:

Felix

Behind the stairs to the crypt Felix had placed a three-legged stool on which he could sit when the abbot was chastising monks above, and he was settled here now, listening to the muted maledictions while he looked fondly on Brother Bernardo, so recently his friend. Bernardo sat politely in his nook, hands folded in his lap, head drifting slightly to one side. If it drooped any more tomorrow, Felix would prop it up. When he’d peeled back Bernardo’s eyelid a few days ago and stared deeply within—his sister once told him heaven’s reflection could be glimpsed there—he’d accidentally squeezed it to get a better view, and the pupil had changed shape, become some sort of devilish triangle. He quickly closed the lid and crossed himself. God wouldn’t let Brother Bernardo wander around paradise with one goat eye. 

Faith was a cure for curiosity. So Felix didn’t wonder how Bernardo would find the other monks up there, or if distance even existed, or whether friendship meant anything where there was no such thing as non-friendship, likewise happiness. He was caught in a little limbo of his own, between the mild promise of heaven and the bustle of men: the ones upstairs, doddering around in their brown wool robes, and the ones busying through streets, the city, the misty fields of home—not misty; there’d been a terrible drought the summer he left, was asked to leave, forty years ago, and the grasses had crackled like fish bones. Now his hours were spent with these remnants. Lonely was too grand a word. 

Felix’s stomach made a petulant noise. His friend was beginning to smell like Monday stew. Soon his face would be as dried and hollowed as Brother Giuseppe to his left, and his chest would collapse like Brother Timothy to his right, but for now Bernardo was the most robust of all the corpses perched on their thrones in this poor stone church on the hill where Remus once set up his challenge to Romulus, and lost.  

*

“You coming to dinner?” The voice traveled down the stone steps. 

Felix switched his head from one propped hand to the other. 

“He’ll still be there in an hour,” the voice said. 

Felix slapped his old knees and hoisted himself toward the stairs. “You’re right. Too much self-denial and one slips into pride. Beef today?” 

Brother Sixtus laughed and reached out a damp hand to pull him the rest of the way. “Roasted cow,” he said. “Is that what they call it?” They hadn’t had red meat since they’d joined the monastery, but this was a pleasant joke to make. “Only four hoofs, so some of us will have to go without.”

“You haven’t heard of the six-hoofed steer out of Briton?” 

“That many, and I’d wager it’s a swimming cow.” 

Oh, and when a joke got rolling! “Back and forth across the straits to France all day; leanest meat you’ll ever eat.” 

“Gave birth to a calf with two more, I heard, and then no one could tell it from an octopus.” 

“In that case, give it to Brother Henry to fry up after all, because you’re talking about a fish.” 

Past the nave—dark and cold, candles by the altar shivering like orphans—the cloisters rang with spoons on bowls, half-sung songs, and Henry with the pot of stew and his iron ladle, the rust flakes from which he called seasoning. 

The newest brother sat next to Felix, his thin hands peeping out of his sleeves; he couldn’t have been past fifteen. The rest of the brotherhood must have looked like wizards to him. 

“How does Brother Bernardo?” The boy’s hair so blonde it was almost white, thinly brushed over the tops of his ears. 

“Oh, doing well.” 

“He has a stink?”

“He was a good man, but he was no saint. Bless him, and all of us.” 

“Bless us all.” The boy still wouldn’t look at Felix, but had now taken his spoon and was stirring wanly. 

“You’d care to see him?”

“My mam died in winter. Couldn’t put her in the ground some time, so I seen her well enough.” 

Felix lifted the bowl to his lips to catch the last of the broth, thinking of the passage of soup from his throat down to his twisty innards, soaking through his stomach to his muscles and his bones, each of them slurping in turn, building their mass with salt and herb and maybe a hint of mackerel, so that the outside world became his inside self. When he was younger, he’d felt such a wall around his person: a wall delightful to be breached, but the more treasured for its fixity. Now everything was just floating recombinant particles. Who could say what was Felix and what was not?

“Do you have dreams then?” the boy asked. 

He meant did Bernardo’s corpse come sneaking into Felix’s nighttime memories—of the farm, of his fair sister, of her friends lined up on a bench plaiting each other’s hair. He once dreamed some boys outside had kicked a ball into the cloisters and before returning it, Bernardo had prodded Felix into a game, the arch into the transept serving as goal, and Felix had scored triumphantly, flapping his arms above his head. And the boys were somehow inside the cloisters then and set up a great cheer. 

“Have you confessed this week?” he asked the boy. 

“Oh, nothing troubles me either,” said the boy, rather quickly. “But things tend to pop up, don’t they, the worrying things, or the things we seen when we was small. I just think all that awful flesh and maybe—you know.” 

“I remember seeing a goat slaughtered when I was young. Did you see something like that?” 

“A goat, no,” the boy said. “Not a goat.” And with his eyes on his shoes, he took his bowl back for a second helping and went to sit by the abbot, Father Peter, who never laughed. 

*

After dinner the brotherhood divided into cleaners and singers, and Felix, as he often did, chose the former task, finding relief in busy hands. Stack the bowls, wipe the tables, sweep the floor, scrub the pots, toss the dirty water on the cabbages, chuck the oily sand in the outhouse, gather the carrot tops and wilted chard and gristle in a basket and visit them upon the happy chickens, who bump their hips in a scramble to the door, their heads leading their legs by a seemingly dangerous margin. And all this to the singing brothers’ tune, a quiet chant if the weather was wet and cold, or a full-throated foot-stomper, their more restful chore never begrudged, for Felix found the greater pleasure in listening. And anyway, his own warble wasn’t pleasing, as his mother was careful to tell him on his first attempt to join the chorus of voices in the country church. He must have been six. “Ohh, my love,” she’d said, and put a hand over his mouth. “Let’s allow the angels to have their turn.” 

It was too dark to see the broom now, so Felix affixed a new candle in his holder, a small brass cup with a ring for his thumb, and took it to the outhouse to sit for half an hour with his begrudging bowels. When he crossed back to the church, Brother Benedictus was kneeling closer to the altar than was customary, and when Felix raised a hand in greeting, he shuffled back. No harm in wanting to touch God. And yet neither Benedictus, nor the newest novitiate, nor most of the brothers had any interest in traveling to the subterranean reaches of this holy space to watch God at his most visible. The last keeper of the putridarium had died two years before, and Father Peter scrambled to find someone willing to tend the corpse of the tender. Felix’s singing was poor, his manuscript illumination haphazard, his understanding of the chemistry involved in baking perilously inexact. But he was not squeamish, and he believed as his mother had told him, that the body was a manifestation of God’s love for us. (This had been included in her list of reasons why young boys should refrain from abusing their most special parts. The penis also belonged to God, and should never be handled with more than sober devotion, as one would hold a ewer of holy water. This image proved very peaceful to young Felix when he masturbated.) So the Father had blessed Felix—some said punished him—with the crypt key. 

On his first visit below, he’d vomited. They looked like a seated council of ghouls, mouths hanging, flesh distended, waiting for someone to speak. His tasks were to defend the bodies from desecration in case of heathen raid and to mark carefully the progress of the bodies’ purgatorial decay so he might converse with monks who had fears about mortality. In practice, the Father discouraged him from loose corpse talk; he said it made the brothers ill.  

Now his predecessor was third in line, a tumbly haystack of bones in a stained old habit, and Bernardo was his new treasure. As he let his supper digest, Felix peered again with wonder at the dead man’s eyes. Where did they sink, and on what timeline? Did the fluid leach out first, and the filmy sack collapse like a popped balloon? Or was there some solid core, an olive pit, that the eye would eventually shrink to? Would blue irises turn red as veins dissolved and blood ran wild? There was no running wild. Just a steady seeping—an occasional audible drip—as Bernardo’s fluids left the openings gently made in his bottom and passed through the hole in his stone seat, his toilet throne, and fell to the packed dirt below, sunless and cold. 

His former friend had been what a kind man would call plumpish, and his arms had funneled that weight like pastry cream into the bags of his hands, leaving a crease at the wrist. He’d been tenderly packed, Bernardo, his limbs as clearly jointed as a doll’s. But the fat was draining. Perhaps Felix shouldn’t keep lifting aside the habit to observe the changes in the decomposing form, but he had to know when the ankles needed a well-aimed lancing. Exploding feet were frowned upon. Bernardo, lucky man to be blind to his mortification. Felix would be the keeper of his honor, and would never cringe, only chuckle. For there is also great humor in our embarrassments, humor in thinking we are anything more than a collection of fluids, of gases that find ways to noisily escape, of bile and pus and goo. 

The wick in his candle had inched down to its nub, and the wax puddled in his brass saucer. He carried it gingerly up the stairs so it would last through the darkness, but it guttered at the top step. Benedictus was gone, and the nave was a void. He knocked into a table and banged his knee, that pucker in the knee to which banging causes a debilitating shock, the funny bone of the leg. He staggered. There was an echoing flutter in the back of the church, and Felix turned to catch a shadow moving. Another truant child snuck in, perhaps, or a woman who’d lost her means. Felix didn’t hear the creak of the big wooden door; the shadow must have been a bat, or a fancy, or a ghost. 

This church was a cake of corpses, the current stone sanctuary built where a clumsy brick one once was, which in turn stole the site from a Mithraic temple, which claimed the sanctity of the original dirt because some lustful god once tricked a virgin here, one or both in the shape of a heron, or was it a stoat. So while elsewhere in this stackable city people came and went, moving unpredictably through homes and shops and streets, here at Santa Prisca they appeared with the bells, confessing their most perverse sins while their dead piled up, knowing just where to find them. 

Once Brother Lucius claimed a spirit kept him up at night sucking his toes, and swore this was because his cell was above the crypt. Father Peter told him all the cells were above the crypt, and any other room he entered in this city was above some other crypt, and no other monk had complained of wet toes. 

“It’s not a sucking so much,” Lucius had said, now alert to the eroticism, “but a licking, as of a friendly dog.” 

“Do you giggle?” Father asked. 

“I am in too much fear.” 

With a prickle on his neck, Felix returned to the cloisters with his saucer of wax. This time of year, his cell’s small window didn’t afford enough light to cut the room’s chill. Stone walls lead to stone bones, that’s what his father said, who built his first house from wood and two years later shook his head as he watched it burn. Cursed family; Felix had brought them no ease. Even up on the bed and wrapped in wool, Felix believed the pine legs soaked up the cold from the floor and conducted it to his aging joints. It was a reminder. He crawled back down and kneeled on a cushion his sister had made and began his count of sins. First always was his secret, which he never named but passed over with an encompassing I am sorry for myself, and then the daily litany of slights, cowardice, impure thoughts, haste. He would repeat all these to a confessor, but forgiveness is a private creature, born at home. 

Once the sins were named, the gratitudes began, and this was almost his happiest time of day, to think back. Brother Vitalis losing a tooth in his soup; the goose that landed in the courtyard and pattered around in circles until someone realized it couldn’t fly out, and Brother Leo wrapping it in his pudgy arms and carrying it outside, tossing it in the air like a gift back to God; the mysterious settling of fluids that led dead Brother Bernardo’s pinky finger to suddenly crook, making Felix feel as if he were being summoned, or offered a private promise; the salt on the bread at lunch, rougher ground than usual, its sharp edges jolting his tongue. 

The final formal prayers were accompanied by Felix’s ragged whip, a careful homemade thing that beat the time on his back, the knots serving as emphasis, as Amen. He was careful not to treasure this, not to harbor pride for his bloody devotion, but merely to keep time, to remind himself with a red drumbeat that his body was not his own, and to offer its impermanence with humility to his Lord. The only lasting thing about Felix was his soul, and this no one on this earth could see or judge. Amen. 

*

The brothers were in a flurry: the collection box had been stolen. The abbot asked each monk to consider which of the parishioners from the previous day might be called squirrelly. 

“There was the one who was gnawing on a chicken bone,” Lucius said. 

“I saw that,” said Marco, “and I had another ask me to pray for his departed wife, and when I asked when she’d deceased, he said tomorrow.” 

“What about the child hiding under the font who wasn’t a child at all but a very small man?” 

“I gave him a roll of bread,” said the youngest brother, Mino. “He looked hungry.”

“If only we’d taken the chicken from the first and given it to the small one.” 

Father bowed his head in defeat. He must have been a poor kind of noble to have wound up at Santa Prisca. 

“I saw a shadow,” Felix said. “It was after I’d come up from the crypt, just before last prayer. It moved along the back wall, and I thought it was a ghost.”

“We’ve gone over this,” Father said. 

“If it wasn’t a ghost, it was either a very large bat or a medium-sized man.” 

“Either of which could’ve carried off the box,” added Marco. 

“But it didn’t have a handle for a bat to grip with its claws.” 

“I imagine it would wrap its wings around the box and then scuttle off on foot.”

“Have you ever seen a walking bat?”

“Brothers,” Father said. His upper lip carried a habitual twist, as if he were bitter, or trying not to sneeze. No one minded that the abbot was cold and told no jokes and sometimes had noisy visitors at night who could not have been monks because they were women. An abbot was like a statue with a pointing finger: there to remind you of duty, not to be judged by human laws. “Brothers, the box is lost. Dominic, you have permission to find us another. I would request you all take turns watching the new box when it has been installed.” 

“Ought we to lock it to its post?”

“There’s an idea!”

“Then someone would take the post.”

“And we’d be out a post.” 

“A new post costs less than a new collection box.” 

“And brothers,” Father said. “Try to remember the value of silence.” 

Felix carried the slops out to the chickens, who didn’t understand the morning’s delay. The day was foggy and cool, and the farm of his childhood seemed painfully far. A rusty-crowned chicken chuckled as he bent to offer a crust. You couldn’t pet a chicken the way you could a cat. Oh, that soft spot at the base of old Johanna’s ears, all silk, undisturbed by the fleas that burrowed in the fur beneath her chin or between her shoulder blades or in the open plain of her lower belly. He brushed the chicken’s tail feathers with the back of his hand; the sensation wasn’t the same. If he’d been a farmer, he could’ve kept all the cats—traveled the country looking for crones dangling sacks off bridges and saved the writhing kittens within—but he couldn’t be a farmer. 

The day he left, his sister had handed him a wrapped cheese and said something to the effect of “We’ll always love you,” or “Behave,” or “I’ll love you if you behave”—he wished he could remember the wording—and it wasn’t until the donkey cart had rounded the bend, the curve of the road obliterating the village of Fara in Sabina, that he thought of how he should’ve answered, but then to leap off the back of the cart and go dashing home, hay flying from his bottom, seemed too absurd, even for him. So he’d sat placidly for most of the day as they tumbled down the evenly terraced Lazian hills, past women in smocks leaning on fences, through loose herds of goats that barked at the driver’s whip. Felix had left the figs in the bucket by the back stoop. There were at least four people he hadn’t bid farewell to. He wanted to learn to draw, but never had. Nor had he fashioned for his parents any sincere apology, and now, barring Methuselah, they were surely dead. He could’ve jumped from the cart in a tumble of courage—at this moment, or at that moment, or, wait for it, this moment—but he sat there, watching the road pass under the back wheels until he became queasy and turned around. The driver, son of some other language, never spoke. 

Rome appeared on the horizon like a vast looted quarry—the city of devils, of scam, of holy Peter the fisherman. Behind one of those hills was the basilical bulk of St. John Lateran, golden. Why wasn’t he bound there? The cart left him at the Porta Flaminia and he picked his way through streets that twisted left when you thought they were going right and down alleys that ended in a wall of blue flowers. He pushed at them with both hands, searching for the door, touching only vines.  

A cobbler was sitting outside his shop with a boot and a last and a mug of beer. Felix only stopped because he mistook the last for a real human foot. 

“Don’t like you how one makes it?”

 Felix squinted. He’d met Romans he could mostly understand, but this man came from somewhere south, where the garble only sounded halfway to his own tongue. “I’m looking for the church of Santa Prisca?” 

“South keeping,” the cobbler said. “Hill the Aventinus.” 

The summer was hotter here without nature’s interference—no drooping branches or clouds of gnats or lone hawk eclipsing the sun in its lazy swoop. Just buildings with angles and more people than he’d ever seen. He was conscious of his clothes, mother-made from wool so rough it seemed to have part of the sheep still in it. A young man passed on the street, shielding his eyes with his hand, and Felix imagined he was looking into a mirror of himself, his Roman self: handsomer, with proper garb, with a stride that disregarded the pace of others, with a hand blocking the sun in a way that said, I have no need of trees, or your poor hawk. I am my own engine.

“You monksing?” The cobbler’s hand licked in and out of the leather boot like a snake. “Close door, talk all the God?” He gestured toward the sky. What an expressive hand; now it looked like he was playing an upside-down lute. 

“My father sent me,” Felix said, though it was more accurately his mother, or rather it was a family decision that arose from a lengthy private confabulation that was eventually reported back to him by his sister. “I’ve no dowry, though, so they might not have me.” 

“Money in the Christians.” The cobbler shook his head. “A story telling themselves, all’s that. A story just. My prayers?”

Felix stayed out of politeness, not because he was afraid of the monastery. 

The cobbler put his left hand, his free hand, up to touch his eye, then slowly moved it to his heart, then dropped it to his stomach, and finally used it to pat his groin. He smiled at Felix. 

“You mustn’t forget also to pray for others.” 

“No needing comes when death.” And having lost the smile, he turned his attention back to the shoe, which he slipped onto the last and pinched around the edges, his brown fingers looking little different from the hide.  

Felix passed the bricks and stone alike with equal awe, the triumph of the Forum in its exhausted collapse as impressive as the crowded apartments, dingy and rich with foreign smells: African spice and fruits he’d never seen. A garden appeared through the rungs of a gate like a prize, and the greenery struck him, only gone from his home a day, as exotic. The trees were not lush but spare—faded pines, dusty and bunched at the top—and the river was not blue but brownish-green, the color water should be at its very bottom. The Circus Maximus was less a field than an abandoned cemetery of broken benches, pierced by obelisks. It was as if the countryside had been fed poison. Climbing the final hill brought him to fresher air, and when he saw the vine galloping out of the cracked cloisters abutting the church—his church—he took it as a white flag from God. He was nineteen years old and believed his spirit was being pulled on a lead by a benevolent hand, saved from his worse self. 

**

Katy Simpson Smith was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She is the author of We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835, and the novels The Story of Land and Sea and Free Men. Her newest novel, The Everlasting, is out now.  She lives in New Orleans, and currently serves as the Eudora Welty Chair for Southern Literature at Millsaps College.

**

Music by CatLofe

The following excerpt from Don’t You Know I Love You by Laura Bogart is excerpted with permission from Dzanc Books.

Don’t You Know I Love You – excerpt

Corvin’s Coffee didn’t lay her off outright; they cut her hours until she was as good as gone. One four-hour shift a week barely covered the cost of a metro fare to and from the hospital, where an orthopedist in their community clinic did her follow-up x-ray and told her she could bank on eight weeks in the cast. He offered to write her a prescription for an in-class note-taker or a week off work. “There’s got to be some perks to this, right?” 

“Not for us poors,” Angelina said. “But thank you for trying a joke. I feel moderately more human now.” 

He did, at least, give her a script for a refill of Oxycodone. Those little white pills were moth wings that ferried her to sleep every night. Without them, she’d be up past sunrise, cutting and pasting her resume into online applications (after she’d already uploaded said resume) and watching YouTube clips of medical procedures: fibroid removals and congested sinus cavities pushed open with balloons inflated at the ends of catheters. The videos had an oddly cathartic allure—terrible violence done to the body to do the body good. She Googled “ways to remove a cast yourself” in between applying for mindless printmaking gigs she was overqualified for and secretarial jobs she knew she’d eventually get fired from, a kindly but exasperated boss explaining that she “just wasn’t a people person.”

There was no hope for unemployment since, technically, she still had a job. By the end of her first week, she decided to apply for food stamps. Armed with copies of her birth certificate, pay stubs, and tax records, she arrived at the social services office with its dingy industrial exterior, hard rows of soiled brick and smeared metal beams. The offices inside were a honeycomb of acid-washed walls and fluorescent lights, chairs with battered, stained (with God knows what) fabric, and tiny desks strewn with manila files. The air smelled of coffee breath and lemon Lysol wipes. 

The woman who reviewed her materials asked how she’d broken her wrist. She should’ve said she’d tripped on a curb or fallen while walking a friend’s dog. Hindsight came quickly, in the amount of time it took her to walk to the bathroom, close herself in a stall, and punch her cast against the door as hard as she could. (Why waste her good hand when she craved a sound loud enough to swallow her anger.) “So, you’ll be getting some kind of settlement, then?” the woman asked, folding her manicured hands over Angelina’s paperwork.

Once those French-tipped fingers steepled over her W-9s, Angelina knew she was done for. Without public assistance or a job, she had no choice but to move back into her parents’ house. 

**

She got back to her apartment as sunset flushed the sky. As she drove past, she saw a gaggle of teenagers, maybe five of them, standing in a circle near the dumpster. She rode slowly, rolled her window down as one of the taller boys chucked something into the center of the circle. From the back, he might’ve been playing dice or even jacks (if people actually played jacks), but Angelina knew better: His movements were crisp and assured in the way that cruelty without consequence can be. The smiles of the boys around him confirmed it before she heard the dog cry. 

She slammed the rental car into park. As she stepped out of the car, she slid the handles of her cloth grocery bag over her cast. The bag was filled with cheap eats, cans of soup and beans and two glass bottles of ginger beer. It dangled loosely off her left arm, so she could grab anything she might need to throw or to break off into a weapon. Anything hard and heavy. Anything that could draw blood. 

Her stomach flattened into an iron sheet. She slammed her cast down on the trunk of the car, screamed, “Stop it!” with a force that pulped her throat. The boys turned to her with their faces ranging from what the fuck to who is this bitch to oh shit. They were so young. Their features were blunt and unformed, waiting for the fingers of some unseen sculptor to pinch and smooth them sharper and more distinct. Some of the boys still had rocks in their hands. Angelina looked at the dog, crouched on her belly, her eyes dazed with pain. 

“Big men, picking on an innocent animal.”

The dog sensed her cue. She was a big dog, a black and tan Shepherd mix with sweet dark eyes and a graying muzzle. As she heaved herself up, her hip cracked. Angelina didn’t look down at her; she needed to keep her eyes on the tallest boy, the ringleader. The dog leaned against Angelina’s legs, pressed her tender hip into the heat of Angelina’s bare skin. 

“Why don’t you throw your little dick pebbles at someone who can fight back?” 

 The tall boy smirked, and she felt the press of male bodies surrounding her. A cold flicker of fear cut through her, but that flicker was swallowed by the hiss that sizzled at the back of her skull, made her body thrum. The tallest boy called her a fat cunt under his breath. She pulled a bottle of ginger beer from the bag and broke it against the trunk of her car. 

This sound startled the boys into backing up. Except for the tall boy, he had to hang tough. He might have been an older teen, all Adam’s apple and blond fuzzy scruff patching his chin. She watched his eyes move from the jagged edges of the bottle to the liquid dripping down the trunk, and then back to the bottle. His nostrils flared slightly. Still, his posture, the general feel of his body, seemed defensive and confused—as if he knew only how to stand firm. He may have been strong, but even if he was, he didn’t know how to throw a punch. People who knew carried themselves differently. 

The ginger beer dripped and fizzed down the trunk, along Angelina’s leg and the dog’s fur. The dog licked Angelina’s calf in furtive slurps. The compounded stickiness made her want to rocket through her skin. She stepped closer to the tall boy, holding the jagged edge flush with his throat. His eyes flashed crazy bitch—his fear was a tiny flame leaping on a wick. She remembered the late-night movies she’d mainlined on her laptop until her father’s footfalls passed her door: Switchblade Sisters, Foxy Brown, Kill Bill, volumes one and two. How the knife-wielding women moved so taut and controlled—and yet with a sense of play, a dance in how they bobbed on the balls of their feet, dipped their shoulders low, ready to surge forward. 

“Go away. Now. Or I’m going to spit in your throat after I open it.” 

The tall boy spat on the ground, inches from her feet. She did not look down. Did not look anywhere except his eyes. He shook his head, muttered, “Fuck this, fuck you,” and turned to leave with his buddies. Long after they’d become specks against the setting sun, Angelina stood there holding the bottle, wishing she could feel their most tender parts crushed by her kick, her fist. That wish was a long snake body that whipped out and pulled back, again and again. Then the dog wagged her tail; it thumped softly along the backs of Angelina’s knees, fanning a private breeze. The dog’s gift to her, sweet and cool. 

“That seems a bit premature, don’t you think,” Angelina said. “For all you know, doggo, I’m no better than those assholes.” 

Still, she walked toward her apartment, making soft kisses of “come here.” The dog followed her, lingered on her doorstep while she got the pitcher of water, the steel wool, and the roll of paper towels so she could clean off the car. The dog sat on the grassy patch of front yard, leaning on her sore haunch and panting. Angelina wet the paper towels before setting the pitcher in front of the dog, who drank in deep, unreserved gulps. When the dog lifted her head, Angelina marveled at the wolfish elegance of her profile. Her fur was mostly white, with a broad brown patch along her back. She had wide-set hips, a narrow waist, and a wide, densely furry chest; if she’d been human, hers would’ve been an Old Hollywood body. Her eyes were warm and dark, lined with fine black fur that gave her otherwise graying face the feeling of a femininity that was both brassy and sad. 

“You should have a movie star name,” Angelina said. “Like Marilyn, but not Marilyn because that also doubles as a PTA chairwoman name.” 

The dog snuffled about the concrete. Her snout lingered over the stickily drying patches of ginger beer before she decided all that good taste had already been spent. When she looked up at Angelina, her mouth opened in a loose, mild pant that seemed bemused and expectant, as if she were truly waiting on her name.

“I don’t think you’re a Mia or a Gia—those are little girl names. How about Francesca? No, that sounds like a nun. Sophia? Valentina?” 

The dog responded with low, affable grumbles, sounds of contemplation. When Angelina suggested Valentina, the dog flattened her ears and belched. 

“Okay, I’m going to take that as a sign. Valentina it is.”

**

Angelina didn’t even try to tell herself that she’d take the dog to a shelter or contact some rescue group. She knew, as soon as Valentina showed that she was already quite at home—submitting to a bath her first evening, patiently enduring Angelina’s one-handed fumbling with the baby shampoo and the shower nozzle, only losing patience as Angelina attempted to pat her dry with a towel and then shaking herself with a rapturous vigor; lifting herself onto Angelina’s full-sized bed and settling contently along the left side, the side where nobody ever slept, so unblemished by other bodies that Angelina had never even washed the pillow cover; and gently pawing at Angelina when she had to go outside—that she would keep her. Valentina had been somebody’s pet once. Just as she’d been somebody’s daughter. 

  Valentina’s paws moved in her sleep, the toes twitching in rhythmic precision as if pressing on piano keys. Every day, Angelina learned something new about the dog. That she didn’t howl in unison with police sirens, but she did flick her ears back in annoyance at those goofy viral videos of other dogs yipping to Christmas carols or “Single Ladies.” That she grumbled along affably, a kind of running commentary, Angelina imagined, about the smell of the rice and beans Angelina prepared for lunch and dinner, or a gentle admonition to relax and take a break after yet another job search engine crashed just before she could save her search history. That, when she was deeply at ease, she slept on her back with her paws splayed limply in the air. When Angelina read that dogs who were “comfortable and secure in their environments” slept that way, her chest and neck flooded with warmth—and that warmth, for once, was pride. 

 Angelina spoke in a low, can’t-wake-the-baby tone when she talked to Hunter, the insurance rep who was assigned to her “accident.” He didn’t sound much older than she was; his voice was bright and muscular with confidence. If she’d known him in school, he’d have been one of those nice-guy jocks who’d make a valiant attempt at working on a group project—nodding, somewhat reverently, as she pulled together the outline by herself, and making a great show of carrying the materials into the classroom. He might even ask her where she was from, and when she said “Baltimore,” ask her, in complete earnestness, if it was, “you know, like The Wire.” 

On this call, Hunter asked for her “occupation” and she said, “Trying to grow a lotus in the mud.” The Oxy had left her system and her cells were steel traps. The only thing soothing her was the gentle heft of Valentina’s warm body pressed against hers. 

 “I studied art and I don’t even think I can paint now, not really,” she said. 

“So, we’ll put your occupation as artist,” he said. 

His voice ebbed on in the heavy warble. She scanned the walls of her apartment, where she’d hung pieces from her senior thesis show: models from life drawing class in stiff-necked Victorian get-ups, assuming stiff-necked Victorian poses as they sat atop packing crates on empty stages with a banner reading sideshow hanging behind them. She’d given the women antlers and the men fox tails. She’d tacked them up (hopefully? arrogantly?) beside framed prints of Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace, The Two Fridas, and Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair. But there was no dialogue between the works, only a series of hiccups and belches. 

“So, I talked to your dad just because his name is on the policy. He told me that he’ll be handling the financial negotiations for the settlement. Said he wants to give you the time to recover. I assume that’s okay?”
The real question sheathed in his tone, in that ever-so-tentative but definitely palpable lilting of his voice on “okay,” was, “So, is he always like this?” And always like this was talking over whoever he was talking to, filling the air with words and the space between words with heat, that humid sky-rumbling sense that he was only waiting for you to stop talking so he could start again—because whatever he had to say mattered. You were standing in air that made you feel slightly nauseous with its thickness, waiting for the constant booming. Or maybe there was no question in Hunter’s tone; maybe she was just imagining it. Maybe her father had come across like any other Italian father of a certain kind of old school: a bit overbearing, sure, a bit loud, but fundamentally loving.

Of course her father wanted to handle the negotiations. Of course he wanted to be Michael Corleone as the door swung shut (or maybe Vito Corleone moving over the rooftops with a leonine assuredness after he shoots Don Fanucci). Of course she was nothing in her own pain. 

“I mean, I’ll have input as well. After all, this happened to me.”  

She tried to put some conviction in her voice, to hold it as long as she could, like taking a swallow of ice water and letting it linger as she stepped outside into a scorcher. Her father would be calling. Any moment now, which turned out to be almost immediately after she’d hung up with Hunter. Valentina put her head on Angelina’s lap and whimpered in sympathy. 

“We have to talk strategy,” he said. “This could be good for you, bad as it is. I told the guy you were in too much pain to work. We need a settlement that could cover a month or two of lost wages—at least. I even said you might have to move back home over it.” 

“I don’t think it’ll take that long,” she said. It can’t take that long. 

“If you take anything now, you’re low-balling yourself. You don’t know what kind of medical bills you’re going to have.”

“I thought insurance covered most of it.”

He sighed. His I’m trying to be patient with you sigh. “Most of it. Not all of it. And you need to think about quality-of-life expenses.” 

“My quality of life—”

“I know you want to live on your own. Believe it or not, I respect that. I do. But we need to string them along, let them think we could honest to God take them to court. No half measures, honey. I’m going to get you all that I can.” 

At the dinner table, he’d always joked that he made a blood sport out of negotiation. Down payments were “lower than a snake doing the limbo” and yearly bonuses were “higher than my Uncle Tony on payday.” He’d laughed and mussed her hair when she said she didn’t understand. “Good,” he’d said. “And I wish I could kick the world’s ass, so you’d never have to.”

Mother reached over and playfully swatted him on the cheek. “Hey, buster, please say butt. You’re not the one who gets calls from the principal.”

He’d looked at Mother in a way that Angelina wouldn’t understand until she’d started watching old movies where an actor’s eyes had to evoke everything the censors didn’t allow. “Well, then, you tell him he can sit on it and spin.” Then they’d started laughing so hard that she had to take a drink of lemonade and he had to set down his fork. Angelina hadn’t even cared that she didn’t share in their secret, she’d just loved sitting in their glow. 

“I’m not some kid anymore,” she said.

“You’re my kid. Always.” 

Angelina felt a vise close around her left hand, and she heard the voice of the slim young doctor who’d bound her wrist, ring, and pinkie fingers in padding and plaster: “It’ll be snug.” Her middle finger, at least, was free.

“You know what I mean.” 

“If this wasn’t a possibly life-changing amount of money, I wouldn’t be so involved. But it really is. And you need someone who can be a Grade A asshole to wrangle it for you.”

“I can be a Grade A asshole.”

“You’ve never dealt with attorneys and insurance people. You can be stubborn and sarcastic—or you can be set.” 

 “Do you really want me to come back?” 

 “It’d probably make your mother happy.” 

He always told her that he could beat her at her own game (her game was, apparently, being stubborn and sarcastic). The only one he couldn’t beat was the only one he never knew about: the quiet game. She’d invented it as a child. She’d start herself with a score of one hundred and deduct twenty-five points each time she could hear her own footsteps. 

There was something exhilarating about seeing how high she could arch on her tiptoes (admittedly, not too high; she was built like her father, brutal and squat). Days she retained her hundred points were thrilling. She’d never won anything in her life, except a best attendance trophy from the softball league that her father made her join when she was in the third grade, the one he’d tossed in the trash before they even got in the car. “Best attendance is what they give people with no talent.”

She begged off their phone call by saying she had to puke. Then, suddenly, she did. The excuse came into her mind and her belly obeyed. As she bent over the toilet, she pulled her own hair back hard enough to coax tears. Valentina followed her into the bathroom, yipping and crying. The dog forced herself into the narrow space between shower and toilet to lick up Angelina’s tears and the spit trailing down her chin. 

 The blood came roiling to Angelina’s face, not from the exertion of throwing up—from pure anger. Her body had betrayed her will, chosen dumb instinct over rational fact. She was grown now. There was nothing he could do to her. Not like before. Not since that day in the kitchen. If you put your hands on me again, I will kill you. She’d dreamt those words before she ever said them. She still dreamt them now. She’d wake up numb to everything but the hot engine of her heart. 

**

 Laura Bogart is a featured writer at The Week and a contributing editor to DAME magazine. She was a featured writer at Salon, where her essays about body image, dating, politics, and violence went viral and were regularly recognized as Editor’s Choice. She has written about pop culture, often through the perspective of gender, for The Atlantic, The Guardian, SPIN, The Rumpus, Vulture, Roger Ebert, The AV Club, and Refinery 29. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and received the Grace Paley Fellowship from the Juniper Institute at UMass Amherst. Laura has been interviewed about body size and pop culture for NPR outlets. Don’t You Know I Love You is her first novel.

The following is excerpted from We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry. Copyright © 2020 by Quan Barry. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Danvers vs. Masconomet

Two minutes into the second half, Masco’s #19 took an indirect shot on our goal. For a moment we lost sight of the ball in the scrum of players huddled in front of the net, the air blurry with sticks as if a hundred defenders were trying to clear it and a hundred others were trying to score. Considering how the first half went down, there really wasn’t any reason for those of us on offense to keep watch­ing, our defense porous as a broken window. True, our opponents, the Masconomet Chieftains, hadn’t officially put it in the net, but it was a foregone conclusion, the ball already as good as in, another Masco goal adorning the scoreboard. Girl Cory turned and started the humiliating trek back to midfield. A few of us began to follow.

“Come on, guys,” pleaded Abby Putnam as she watched our offense retake its positions on the center line, readying ourselves for yet another back pass that restarts play after a goal. “Masco hasn’t even scored yet.” No sooner were the words out of her mouth than the ball found daylight, shooting out of the throng and right through our own Mel Boucher’s heavily padded feet.

Abby hung her head, temporarily deflated. An empty potato-chip bag went sailing by, a tumbleweed in the wind. Quickly she pulled herself together and jogged back to midfield where the rest of our offense was already waiting, our forward line fanning ourselves with our sticks like a flock of overheated southern belles.

“Come here often?” offered Jen Fiorenza snidely from her posi­tion at left forward, but we were all too tired to tell her to cram it.

The Chieftains didn’t even cheer. It was 92° in the shade. If we could’ve rolled over and offered our throats, our pale underbellies flashing in the July sun, we would’ve, each of us a white flag. There were twenty-eight minutes of play left. It was hard to know who was having less fun—us or them. Mel Boucher stood in the goal, whacking the earth with her stick like a guitar god trashing his Stratocaster. Even at midfield you could hear what we knew by then was a string of invectives pouring out of her helmet. Tabarnaque! Je m’en câlisse! All first half Mel had been complaining about the sun being in her eyes, but we’d switched sides at halftime, so now it was God’s fault. “Baptême!” she shouted. From the looks of it there was a girl on the other team who was also French Canadian. You could tell by the smirk on her face. The referee just looked puzzled, unsure of whether or not she should throw a yellow card for sportsmanship, though honestly she wasn’t sure what she was hearing.

Why had we thought this year would be any different? Wasn’t that the very definition of insanity—standing around with our sticks in the air, not marking our man, playing everything but the angles, yet expecting things to be better, the ball effortlessly sailing into the opponent’s net? Usually when people talk about tradition, they mean the good things people pass down to whoever’s around to take up the mantle. Usually “tradition” doesn’t refer to stuff like whole seasons without a single win, or untold handfuls of broken fingers, split lips, or the time the bus got a flat on the way home from an away game double-digit drubbing and we sat by the side of Route 1 for the better part of an hour inhaling the world’s exhaust.

It was Monday afternoon, our first full day at Camp Wildcat on the University of New Hampshire campus, this atrocity our first scrimmage of the week. There would be other scrimmages every afternoon, other chances to have our asses served to us on a silver platter with a sprig of garni. Had we each really paid $375 to live in the dorms and spend our mornings doing burpees, our afternoons being publicly gutted? We were down 6-0 thirty-two minutes into play. By the time we finally scored at the fifty-five-minute mark, Masco was playing their third string.

Only Abby Putnam let out a halfhearted cheer as her shot hit the back of their net. You had to hand it to her—she had team spirit. Be. Aggressive. B-E aggressive. You couldn’t be a Putnam and live in Danvers and not be a believer, even when every other rational marker said don’t. Apparently the Putnams were just born like that. They had a way of latching on to a story and not letting go no mat­ter what, like a terrier with a rabbit. Abby was still in high spirits from last year’s season when we went 2-8, our best record in more than a decade. “We could go all the way to States this year,” she told Sue Yoon on the drive up to Camp Wildcat. Abby was sitting in the passenger seat, peeling her third banana of the day. About the only thing in life Abby Putnam feared was low potassium. “We’re seniors,” she added. “It’s our time.”

Sue Yoon flicked her Parliament out the window. Her hair was dyed Purplesaurus Rex, the artificial flavors in Kool-Aid coloring her locks a subtle shade of lilac. “Who do you think we are?” she said, the smoke vortexing out her nose. “The Bad News Bears?”

It was a good question. The Bad News Bears had come out in theaters more than a decade before, but it was the only sports movie we could name featuring a group of ragtag misfit kids. None of the other passengers in Sue’s pink Volkswagen Rabbit dubbed the Panic Mobile said anything. Maybe if one of us had given it a little more thought, things wouldn’t have gone down the way they did. Ancient urges which should’ve been snuffed out long ago wouldn’t have been unleashed. But sometimes objects in a mirror are closer than they appear. When you don’t speak up, you get what you get.

That afternoon at Camp Wildcat as Masconomet was annihilat­ing us brick by brick, we were eight months past having gone 2-8, and only Abby Putnam still openly admitted to wanting to be team captain come fall. At the end of halftime, just before retaking the field against Masco, we huddled up and hit the ground three times with our sticks. “Field field field,” Abby yelled.

Only a couple of us responded, the optimists and the overly polite, folks like Amy “Little Smitty” Smith and Julie Kaling and maybe AJ Johnson and Boy Cory. “Hockey hockey hockey,” they intoned more out of kindness rather than any innate hunger to win. The rest of us just kept our mouths shut.

Thirty minutes later we were out of our misery. The officials couldn’t even agree on the score. One claimed it was 8-1, the other 9-1. “Field field field,” screamed Abby, trying to gather us together for one final moment of bonding, but nobody answered, our minds already on showers and whether or not the soft-serve machine was fixed in the cafeteria.

“Nice game, ladies,” said Pam, the UNH senior assigned to be our coach. Real coaches weren’t allowed at camp, so players on the UNH collegiate team acted as such. Though we’d been thoroughly pounded by Masco, Pam had the same pleasantly surprised look on her face she always sported, like someone who’d scored a C+ on a test when at best they’d been hoping to land a D. Jen Fiorenza said Pam was stoned fifty minutes out of every hour. She said you could tell by the monstrous leg brace holding Pam’s knee together, her meniscus allegedly shredded like pulled pork, and by the way she washed back small pink pill after small pink pill with a Tab that’d been sitting out in the sun all day, how ten minutes later her face would melt into an expression of sheer boneless bliss.

“My aunt’s like that,” said Jen. “You could set her hair on fire and she wouldn’t even blink.” By “aunt,” we knew Jen was really talking about her mom.

Newly defeated, we spit out our mouth guards and ripped off our cleats, untaped our wrists. In twos and threes, we slugged back to the dorms through the late-afternoon air, the White Mountains’ humidity like dog stew. The cafeteria wouldn’t open up for another hour. When it did, Heather Houston would ladle out her third bowl of Cap’n Crunch for the day, at this point not even bothering to hide it under a plateful of salad. After dinner, the whole camp would probably watch some old tape of an Olympic game. If we were unlucky, the UNH head coach, Chrissy Hankl, might swing by and share with us a few inspirational clichés about unity, her baby-blue sun visor perfectly in place even though it would be well past nine, the sun long down behind South Mountain. Then bedtime, wash, rinse, and eight hours later repeat.

The morning sessions were mostly about conditioning. The camp planned it that way. First thing after breakfast before the heat got too bad we ran suicides. In the weight room we pushed through a series of wall sits, the room painted shiny with our back sweat. During the morning sessions they kept us together—freshmen, JV, and varsity, more than fifty teams from all over Massachusetts and New Hampshire running around with zinc on our noses. Afternoons we broke up into teams to scrimmage. Nights we watched tapes of games. Late night some of us snuck out to the fields to smoke. Late, late night some girls from Watertown tried to defect over to the dorms where the boys’ football camp was staying, but when they knocked on a random door, a girl answered brandishing a lacrosse stick.

The night we got demolished by Masco, Coach Hankl and her sun visor didn’t make an appearance at our video viewing. There were no old tapes of the bronze-medal match between Scotland and East Germany. Instead, we gathered in a run-down auditorium with the stuffing coming out of the seats and watched an instructional video about sportsmanship. It was the end of the ’80s, 1989 to be exact. Our parents hadn’t learned yet to scream at the referees, to shout things at the other team like, kill her, take her down. In the video, two teams form single-file lines on opposite sides of the field, then walk past one another, each girl saying something nice to the other girl as they high-five. Good game. Nice hustle. Good stickwork. One girl even says to her opponent, I like your eyeliner.

“What is she, a lesbo?” someone from the Greenfield team yelled. People sniggered. None of us knew any girls who were gay, or so we believed. When things went down later, Catholic martyr Julie Kaling said she thought only boys could be gay, and we razzed her for it, which was pretty mean, considering. Then the video started to get shaky, and pressing the tracking button didn’t help, and when one of the counselors finally hit eject, the tape got stuck in the VCR, and the team from Greenfield cheered.

And that’s what happened on Monday in the third week of July 1989, at the UNH Wildcat Field Hockey Camp. To recap: We got trounced by Masconomet. Heather Houston’s pupils were starting to look like magnified nuggets of Cap’n Crunch behind her 20/200 glasses. The soft-serve machine was still out of service. I like your eyeliner became the camp wisecrack. Mel Boucher got scored on a whole bunch and decided to look outside the box for some much-needed divine intervention.

And that made all the difference.

Psychologically, a goalie can only take so much, even a French Canadian one from a family of Catholic males. After she got scored on eight or nine times, Mel stormed back to her dorm room and took matters into her own hands. She got to work, ripping out the used pages in the notebook she’d gotten for her birthday, the one with the picture of Emilio Estevez printed on the cover, her parents secretly hoping Emilio’s boy-next-door appeal might guide their tomboy daughter gently into the right port, so to speak. Years later she would try to explain why she did it by saying that sometimes the Lord is busy and He needs us to be self-starters, show a little moxie.

But this is only the beginning of our tale. For now, let’s just say that Mel and her moxie made some new friends in low places. And thanks to the dark pledge Mel scribbled down in Emilio, for the rest of the week, the wins would come rolling in. Case in point: the very next day in our scrimmage against the Merrimack Valley confer­ence juggernaut Andover, we battled to a 1-1 draw. Sacré bleu! To go from 8 or 9 to 1 to a tie against a perennial powerhouse was unheard of. Suddenly heads everywhere began exploding. Girls on the other teams started to mimic us, desperate to go from zeros to heroes as fast as we did in the course of a single afternoon. The cafeteria couldn’t keep the Cap’n Crunch stocked fast enough.

Our secret? Over the course of the week, alone and in pairs, each of us made the grim pilgrimage to Mel’s second-floor dorm room and signed our names in her battered notebook, each time Emilio Estevez and his chipmunk cheeks staring straight into our souls. And with every new signature, Mel would cut another thin blue strip off one of her old stretched-out athletic socks and tie it around our arm just above the muscle where we could keep it hidden under our shirtsleeves, the sock a secret sign of our allegiance to what Heather Houston simply called “an alternative god,” the whole lot of us sud­denly running around like junkies with our arms tied off.

And that’s all it took for the proverbial worm to turn. We didn’t even have to believe in what Mel via Emilio was selling. Looking back at those early days, it was just kid stuff. All we had to do was keep our sticks on the ground and mark our man and yell hockey hockey hockey when the time was right and keep our mouths shut about the whole thing, all the while disregarding the insatiable hun­ger that was silently growing inside each and every one of us like a tumor. What could possibly go wrong? We were an eleven-man bevy of newly empowered teen girls. Abby Putnam was right. It was our time. Every three hundred years or so, our kind gets loosed upon an unsuspecting world. And this time around, the history books would know us as the 1989 Danvers High School Women’s Varsity Field Hockey Team. Be. Aggressive. B-E aggressive.

Tuesday after our 1-1 tie against mighty Andover, while still pad­ded up, Mel Boucher lowered herself down on one knee in the goal and bowed her head. This time only silence came pouring out of her helmet. The officials were still adding things up, but it looked like she had made an unbelievable fifty-two saves in net. Fifty-two saves coupled with Abby Putnam’s one goal and suddenly Camp Wildcat’s biggest losers were the talk of the town.

That night after dinner and more bowls of Cap’n Crunch, we schlepped to the auditorium for some videos about hand position and defending and attacking off corners. Toward the end of the evening Chrissy Hankl appeared with her trademark baby-blue sun visor. There was a rumor going around that her hair was attached to it. “Ladies,” she said.

“Apparently the chick doesn’t know us,” whispered AJ Johnson to Becca Bjelica.

“No duh,” replied Becca, as she pulled up her bra strap.

“I’m pleased to announce that a new camp record was set today,” said Coach Hankl. Then she called Mel up onstage and handed her a piece of paper with a pair of field hockey sticks crossed like a shield over some gibberish about excellence. Afterward, we noticed the certificate wasn’t printed on heavy card stock or anything, but we were still happy for her.

“I’ll have what she’s having,” joked Sue Yoon, quoting everyone’s favorite new movie line of the summer from When Harry Met Sally, which they weren’t carding for at the mall, although it was rated R.

Mel shot us a sly wink from the stage, which was surprising because the Mel Boucher we knew was more likely to accidentally wink with both eyes. In the low wattage of the auditorium, her all-American Québécois complexion looked radiant as any seraphim come to deliver the good news. And it was good news. For a team that most recently had posted a 2-8 record, it was wicked good news. Who knew? You scrawled your name in a book and tied yourself up like a pot roast with a piece of smelly blue tube sock and voilà! The world was your oyster. Mel was our very own archangel of darkness. In time, we were all having what she was having. Even Abby Putnam signed on after some initial sputtering. And what Mel Boucher was having was nothing the Judeo-Christian world we inhabited would have smiled on approvingly.

See, it turns out all those long dark hopeless seasons, we’d been putting our chips on the wrong god. Honestly, of all places on earth, the Town of Danvers should have seen us coming.

**

Born in Saigon and raised on Boston’s north shore, Quan Barry is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the author of four poetry books; her third book, Water Puppets, won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and was a PEN/Open Book finalist. She has received NEA Fellowships in both fiction and poetry, and her work has appeared in such publications as Ms. and The New Yorker. Barry lives in Wisconsin.

**

Music by CatLofe

 

The following excerpt from Loved Mars, Hated the Food by Willie Handler is reprinted here with permission from Kyanite Publishing LLC. 

Chapter 1

Mars

Earth calendar: 2039-09-02

Martian calendar: 45-11-582

I’m sure I’m a dead man. 

I’m seated on a large red boulder next to my rover, overlooking the gaping crater that was once the first permanent Mars Colony, Futurum. The silence of Valles Marineris is broken only by my heavy breathing. My throat feels sealed off and I’m steaming up my face mask. 

Beyond the dense smoke spewing from the crater, the Colony rubble spreads over a wide radius, metal debris glittering against the red sand and rocks. My head spins, and I’m sweating despite my suit’s cooling system. I hope it’s a hallucination brought on by the weed brownie. 

Maybe I died in the explosion. Maybe I’m having an out of body experience. What was I thinking when I signed up for this mission? I’m a thirty-two-year-old chef from Toms River, New Jersey. I don’t know anything about surviving on a barren planet. I just prepare meals. 

I stand up and yell at the top of my lungs, “IS ANYONE ELSE ALIVE?” and wince as my voice bounces off the inside of my helmet. 

With my source of food, water and oxygen gone, I don’t think I’ll be living on this planet much longer. Or anywhere else for that matter.

The quiet is interrupted by the clunk of shifting rocks. As I turn toward the sound, I notice two figures standing just beyond the fringes of the Colony blast radius. I spring to my feet and squint. I’m not the only survivor. 

I take a few steps forward and squint harder. It looks like they aren’t wearing spacesuits. 

I try to shake off the marijuana haze as I climb into the rover, reaching for the power button to turn on the vehicle. After shifting the gears, I carefully press on the accelerator pedal, slowly approaching them. The bouncy ride and the clouds of red dust kicked up by the tires make it difficult to see. 

The two figures are the size of preteens, although one is several inches taller than the other. They each have two arms, two legs, and coppery wrinkled skin. 

Either I’m more messed up than I think…or these guys aren’t human. 

The taller Martian has larger feet and the shorter one has a sizeable belly. Both wear tunic tops and loose-fitting trousers made from metallic orange and silver, like they’re wearing Harley Davidson duds.

I brake about twenty feet away. The aliens step toward me. I’m convinced that they either intend to vaporize me with a ray gun or make me into a slave. I wet my spacesuit. Not my best day.

Their large heads bobble as they shuffle. Their big, black, pupil-less eyes are fixed on me. A flat nose and no ears make them look like Shar Peis. I climb out of the rover, raise my right hand, and wave. They glance at each other. Mission training never covered this. 

I raise my hand again to wave and shout, “Live long and prosper. Dif-tor heh smusma.” 

Then I try the Vulcan salute, spreading my four main fingers into two sets to form a V. Though I’m positive they can’t tell because my hand is in the glove of my spacesuit. 

No reaction. This is going well.

I try again. “Klaatu barada nikto.” 

I remember the line from a movie my dad made me watch when I was a kid, The Day the Earth Stood Still. It’s the first thing that pops into my head. Again, they look at each other.

A strange voice resonates in my head. Klaatu barada nikto, are you intact? 

At first, I think I imagine it. I hear it again. Klaatu barada nikto. What transpired here?

I watch the two aliens closely, but don’t see any mouth movement. 

Klaatu barada nikto, can you comprehend? says the voice.

“Yes,” I respond in a shrill voice. “Please…please, don’t kill me.” 

Klaatu barada nikto, says the voice. We intend no harm.

“How am I hearing you?” I ask, pointing to my ears. “And I’m not Klaatu barada nikto. I’m Dixon Jenner.”

The two Martians amble over to the rover. The short one with the big belly walks around the rover before stopping and placing a hand on the side of the vehicle. Good wishes Dixon Jenner. I am Bleeker and this is my partner, Seepa. What then is Klaatu barada nikto?

I shrug. “No clue. How are you communicating with me?”

The voice in my head changes. “Through telepathy. How else would one communicate?”  It must be the tall Martian, Seepa. She wears a dozen bracelets up and down her arms. 

“So, you understand the English language?” I ask.

We transmit and receive thoughts from one being to another, says Bleeker. I do not comprehend the concept of ‘English language.’  

“Are you kidding?” I try to climb back into the rover but miss a step and fall over.  

I don’t know why but I laugh hysterically. It might be the brownie. 

What are brownies? asks Seepa. Did they cause you to topple over?

“How did you hear that? I never said anything?”

Yes, you did, says Bleeker. I also heard you.

I grimace. “I don’t like the idea of you hearing my thought.”

You can block your thoughts whenever you wish, says Seepa. I just think of a black wall or something analogous.

I stand up, shaking my head. “Yeah, I’m going to have to work on that.” 

We picked up shockwaves from the detonation, she continues. That is why we journeyed to the surface to investigate.

She was opposed to investigating, says Bleeker.

A shrill voice cuts him off. That is not accurate. I did not want to interrupt my activities to probe what shook our dwelling.

It is constant negativity from you, says Bleeker.

I step aside as they argue. Great. I travelled over a hundred million miles to listen to a couple bicker.

We are not bickering, replies Seepa. We just have dissimilar perspectives. 

She breaks into a smile. Well, I assume it’s a smile. The corners of her mouth move horizontally.

What type of structure was constructed here? asks Seepa, creeping closer to the edge of the crater.

I kick at small stone in front of my boot. “I came from Earth with twenty-three other people. We had a colony here.”

You are an Earth-being? asks Bleeker, reaching out to touch my spacesuit. And why are you wearing that strange outfit? 

“I…I would die outside this suit. The environment is too harsh for Earth-beings…I mean Earthlings.”

Your community was precisely above our dwelling, says Bleeker. What happened to it? There is only this large depression.

My voice wavers. “I don’t even know where to start, man. I was part of a mission to establish a permanent colony on your planet.” I gaze at the canyon walls in the distance. “In Valles Marineris.”

We call this, Brootah. But why here? asks Seepa.

“We were told the canyon walls would provide protection from the winds,” I say.

Looks like the winds should not have been your primary concern, says Seepa. 

And how permanent could this community have been, if it is gone? asks Bleeker.

I feel as though there are weights on my shoulders. “It was permanent. I don’t get it. I was setting up tonight’s dinner and was having trouble with the nuclear oven.”

Nuclear? chirps Bleeker. We are not acquainted with this.

“Me neither,” I respond. The buzz from the brownie makes it difficult to focus. I wish these aliens would stop interrupting. “I needed our mission engineer to look at the equipment. She was out with a group collecting rock samples.”

That seems like a pointless endeavour, says Seepa. The surface is littered with rocks.

“The point I’m trying to make,” I say, frowning, “is that while I waited for them to get back, I hopped into this rover to, um…” I feel the two remaining brownies in my suit pressing against my ribcage, the ones I had been planning on sharing with Tammy. “To kill time.”

What about the brownies, says Seepa. You continue to mention them.

Are brownies another type of Earth-being? asks Bleeker.

“No, I didn’t say anything.”

Is this Tammy-being a brownie? asks Bleeker.

I pick up a stone and toss it toward the crater. “Tammy was part of the crew. She radioed me to let me know she was back at the Colony, I headed back,” I say. “Then I heard this explosion and when I got here…” 

Images of Tammy spin in my head. I look back at the crater and sob like a baby. 

How unfortunate, replies Bleeker, waddling closer to the crater. He carefully avoids several pieces of debris that are still smouldering. Not that you survived, but that the other beings did not.

“I can’t survive out here alone,” I spurt out, my voice quaking. I grab Bleeker by the arm. “Can you help me?”  

No need to be alarmed, says Bleeker, pulling his arm away from my grip. You will come with us. We will assist in sustaining you.

Bleeker, be sensible, snaps Seepa, stepping in front of her partner. We cannot have this Earth-being reside with us. What will the other citizens say?

“Holy crap,” I say, dropping to my knees. “You can’t just leave me here. Please help me.”

We cannot leave this unfortunate Earth-being to expire here, says Bleeker, patting Seepa on the back. Do not be distressed, Seepa. I have formulated a strategy.

I scramble back up, letting out a huge breath. Then I stop exhaling. 

“Wait—there are more of you?”

They look at each other, smirking in their straight-mouthed way, their heads bob from side to side like turtles. They must be mocking me.

Yes, says Seepa. There are sixty million beings, under the surface.

Seepa, that is an antiquated tally. There are sixty-three million.

Do you have to be persistently correcting me? 

I just want to ensure our visitor possesses the most current statistics. Stop being so sensitive.

I am not being sensitive.

These two Martians are creeping me out. I could be dying, and they would be having a hissy fit.

We aren’t creeping anywhere, says Bleeker. You are not being lucid. It could be the brownie objects you keep mentioning.

Bleeker, maybe the Earth-being is ill, says Seepa.

Then I look down at the oxygen indicator on my chest.

“I’m a little bit desperate,” I murmur with a shaky voice, even if the Martians can’t pick up the sound. “I’m not going to survive much longer in this suit. When I run out of oxygen, I’ll be dead too.”

Bleeker turns and plods toward the closest canyon walls. Follow us. We will resolve your depleting supply of breathable air.  

He stops and turns to his partner. That is, unless you have an objection.

No, says Seepa. I concur that we cannot leave this Earth-being alone on the surface. It would be cruel. Can we return to our dwelling? I detest the surface.

I abandon my rover and follow the two Martians on foot, glancing back at the portable 3D printer lodged in the back of the vehicle, its red power button blinking on and off. I know it might come in handy, but it can’t produce oxygen. 

Valles Marineris is much like the Grand Canyon but much deeper and with no vegetation. Massive rock formations tower over us from all sides. Overhead, the sky is hazy from big clouds of dust, blowing well above the canyon floor. I can’t see the Earth through the red swirling sand.

A few steps ahead of me, the bow-legged aliens waddle like a pair of penguins. I have difficulty keeping up in my suit and space boots, stumbling over the rough terrain whenever I pick up my pace. Five times, I trip and fall onto my hands and knees. They waddle ahead. 

Bleeker turns to look at me, his head cocked to one side. What does it mean ‘things are so fucked up?’

“Crap, you’ve been reading my mind,” I say. I’ve got to get a hang on this blocking shit.”

Apologies, but I had the impression you were having uncertainties about coming with us.

“No. No. Not at all.”

We continue to hike across the rough terrain until we are almost at the red cliff face. As we are about to walk around a shallow crater, I hear voices that didn’t belong to Bleeker and Seepa. The two Martians freeze. Then Bleeker grabs my arm and shoves me behind a large boulder.

I peer around our shelter to see what has them so alarmed. There is a group of blue Martians standing over chubby one who is stretched out naked on the ground. Like Bleeker and Seepa, he is reddish—well, more of a reddish orange, like an under ripe tomato or an Oompa-loompa. 

“Who is that?”

That is Cheyhto, our Grand Leader. He controls our government and many Martian enterprises. He is a very powerful being. 

“What is he doing out here?”

He takes pleasure in going to the surface to lie in direct sunlight, says Bleeker. It turned his outer membrane that unusual hue.

“Who are those other Martians around him?” I ask. 

He is an exceptionally important being, says Bleeker. They take direction from him or are assigned tasks to complete.

“Oh, an entourage,” I say. “And why are they blue?”

There are two distinct Martian classes, says Bleeker. About one-third of Martians are Machers, which is the class we belong to. The remainder are from the Arbiter class and have the blue pigmentation–

Bleeker, this is not a suitable occasion for a sociology lesson, say Seepa. We need to journey past Cheyhto without him discovering Dixon Jenner.

“Is it bad that he sees me?”

Affirmative, says Bleeker. How can we explain why you are wearing that space outfit? And he might send us to one of our social re-education centers.

“What the hell are those?” I ask.

You do not wish to know, replies Bleeker, looking in the direction of the Grand Leader. I have an idea. Seepa, I will distract Cheyhto and his entourage while you sneak Dixon Jenner past here.

I am apprehensive about this, she says.

Do not be, says Bleeker. This will work.

He grabs my arm. Keep your thoughts silent.

Before I can respond, Bleeker steps from behind the boulder and walks toward the group of Martians. Greetings Grand Leader.

One of his henchmen steps in front of Bleeker. Why have you journeyed to the surface?

Our dwelling shook from a detonation, replies Bleeker. So, I traveled here to investigate.

Still lying on his back, Cheyhto turns his head to look at Bleeker, frowning. We felt no vibrations.

Cheyhto jerks up into a sitting position. What is that voice I hear? Who is with you?

He points to one of the Arbiters. Did you hear it?

No, Grand Leader.

I did, says Cheyhto, shoving an underling in the direction of the voice. Go see who is there. 

Grand Leader, I am here alone, says Bleeker.

We will see, says Cheyhto, his eyes fixed on Bleeker. What is this about vibrations?

It was a short, but very distinct, says Bleeker, pointing in the opposite direction of the Colony site. It turned out to be an object from space that had crashed onto the surface.

The Arbiter returns from his search. I found no one, Grand Leader.

Well, you have completed your investigation, barks Cheyhto, as he returns to lying on his back. Proceed back underground. You are disturbing my sunning session.

While Bleeker creates his diversion, we double back and take an indirect route to the canyon wall. We arrive almost at the same time as Bleeker.

Did you have any problems? asks Seepa, rushing to hug him. 

He was more concerned about being disturbed than why I was on the surface, says Bleeker. We should return to our dwelling before another incident occurs.

Bleeker lumbers toward the wall of rock in front of us. When he is about ten feet away, he steps onto a black metallic mat. The ground around us rumbles.  

A part of the wall in front of us separates from the rest of the cliff and slowly slides down into the ground. I hadn’t noticed the portal because it was the same color and composition as the rock around it.  I step several steps forward to get a better look. I don’t see any track or mechanism operating the portal. The vibrations kick up dust and sand, and the Martians cover their faces with their arms.  

In less than a minute, a portal opens. It’s large enough for me to step through without stooping.  

Bleeker motions to me with his hand. Earth-being, please descend these stairs with us.

I look back through the portal. If I follow them down, will ever get out again? No one is going to find me down there.

**

Author Willie Handler was a satirist well before he became a novelist. Hailing from Canada, where self-deprecating humor is part of the national character, he finds targets for his humor everywhere. His targets include friends, family, co-workers, politicians, farmers, subway passengers, bureaucrats, telemarketers, Martians, and his barber, Vince. With his most recent work he has crossed over to the world of speculative fiction.  

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Music by CatLofe

The following excerpt from Orpheus Girl by Brynne Rebele-Henry is reprinted with permission from Soho Teen:

 

Orpheus Girl excerpt

Part One: Above World

Every night Grammy and I watch Mom in the TV. I always thought Mom was a silver screen kind of beauty because of that picture of her in high school: blonde, dimples, all clean-looking. But in this show she’s dark-sexy, her hair colored a deep brunette, silky bedsheets held up around her neck with gold ribbons. Mom left Pieria when I was a kid. Grammy would say it was because she needed to go be Aphrodite in the TV. I know that it’s because she was tired of it all, of the town and the people. So she disappeared one night. She only told Grammy as she was walking out the door. I was two.

..

In the car on the way to church this morning, I write Sarah’s name on the condensation on the passenger’s window, then wipe it off before Grammy can see.

..

The car is a worn-down blue Volvo from the seventies. It’s a miracle it’s still running. Every time Grammy slides the key in the ignition and it actually starts, she thanks God under her breath. The seat belts are frayed so much that they could snap if you pulled too hard, so we stopped using them. I have to hold onto the car door to keep from falling out of my seat every time Grammy brakes. She drives like a maniac. Runs over mailboxes on a regular basis, hits curbs, mows down shrubs. Once she ran over an abandoned lemonade stand. She never stops to deal with what she’s run over, just keeps going, like she’s late on her way to somewhere really important.

..

I get through the service like I always do: running myths through my head. Ever since I found my mom playing Aphrodite on that soap opera, I’ve been memorizing them. I know it’s stupid, but I’ve always thought that one day I’ll open the door and she’ll be there, and I’ll need something to talk about. And since my mom’s Aphrodite, I might as well be able to talk about myths. During the service I think about Persephone, how the girl was pulled away from everything she’d ever known and taken to a strange world. Or Atalanta. In these myths, girls are always being changed or taken by men, their voices, their protests ignored. And the queer girls, like Atalanta, are forced to become something else.

Grammy’s always talking about how one day I’ll have a normal life, with a husband and two kids (a boy and a girl) and a brick house with a white picket fence and a big yellow dog who’ll run around the yard. She says my husband should work so I don’t have to, and I’ll stay home all day and make cookies the way she taught me and go to PTA meetings and church. Whenever she talks about it, she gets a misty look in her eyes and twists the gold chain of her cross necklace between her forefingers, and I know it’s not my life she’s imagining, that secretly she’s wondering what would have happened if her own husband hadn’t died in a car accident at twenty-seven and left her with a two-year-old girl, if her girl hadn’t gotten pregnant senior year of high school only to run off three years later.

Instead, she still has a job arranging and delivering flowers for weddings and funerals and baptisms, continual reminders of her own wedding and her husband’s service, and she makes me go to cotillions and dance with boys, refuses to let me wear pants to school and makes me go to church three times a week and Bible camp in the summer and try out for cheerleading every August.

..

Every fall since fourth grade, she’s bought me a new pair of shiny green pom-poms. She takes the day off work to come to the tryouts with me. I walk into the gym with a lump in my throat, but I never can kick high enough or land lightly enough, and every year we drive home together in disap-pointed silence. When we get home, Grammy always says she has a “headache worse than Satan,” and she goes upstairs to lie down and change out of the “Go Team!” sweatshirt she wears just for tryouts. We both know that her head’s not hurting, that she just doesn’t want to have to pretend not to be let down yet again, but I always nod and don’t say anything.

This year, before she went upstairs, she said, “You were supposed to be my second chance.” But she said it so quietly I think I wasn’t supposed to hear her.

Since then we’ve never talked about tryouts again. I think maybe she finally just gave up.

♦♦♦

ONCE THE service ends, I heap pastries and the little water-cress and pickle and peanut butter tea sandwiches that the church ladies make onto my plate, then sit down on the coffee-stained couch outside Preacher Sam’s office and eat until I feel sick. Every time I go to Sarah’s dad’s church I get this sinking feeling, like something’s wrong with me and if they find out, when they find out, it’s all over.

..

Most nights I dream that Sarah and the choir boys and Preacher Sam are peering down at me. I’m wearing another girl’s clothes but I don’t know why. When Preacher Sam hands me a crucifix, my skin starts burning and wings burst out of my back, and I’m trying to get the wings to stop sprouting from my back but they won’t, and soon I’m screaming and burning and they’re whispering “freak” and then they’re yelling it.

..

The dreams started when I was eight, shortly after I real-ized I was different from the girls I went to school with, but I didn’t yet know how, just that there was some strange and invisible barrier separating me from them. Often, at after-school church camp, I’d watch the girls running around, skipping rope or drawing on the pavement outside the church, and my back would ache for reasons I could never discern. On those days, I tried to pinpoint the difference, the thing separating me, causing me to feel like every movement I made was an act, a dream that I would wake up from, like a fortune-teller sifting her tea leaves, trying to gather together some foreign objects and principles into a crystalline answer. But for years the bowl would come back empty, nothing more than water and stray oolong straining to reach the surface.

..

When I was born, I had two small, misplaced vertebrae sticking out of my back. They looked like wings. The doctors took pictures, then set the vertebrae back in place. Now I just have two bumps and a line of scars on my back. Sometimes at night, I run my fingers over the bumps, try to imagine what the wings would have looked like. The doctors made the first incision in my vertebrae, so the worst of the scars are low on my back, though the scar tissue maps all the way up to my shoulders in a messy sprawl. The doctors said I healed better than expected. They’d thought I’d be disfigured. But I just don’t wear bikinis like the other girls, always make sure my tops don’t slip down past my shoulder blades. It’s not that the scars are ugly; it’s just that I don’t need anyone else thinking about my being different even more than they already do. I don’t want to cause any suspicion— at least not any more suspicion than being motherless in a little town already creates.

..

The only time that Grammy ever acknowledged my scars was once when I was ten. I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror staring at the faded-to-pale lines, watching the ruined skin ripple when I moved. I remember trying not to cry when I saw how ugly it was, how the marks of what was once a wound, a defect, covered me. I’d never paid much notice to the scars before, had always just considered them a part of me, normal, but the day before, Sarah and I had gone swimming, and when she’d crouched at the edge of the pool before diving in, I saw the smooth stretch of her back, her unscarred shoulders, the skin taut and gold from the sun, and a hard lump of something akin to shame worked its way into my throat and made it hard to swallow.

Later that night, alone in the house, I prepared to try to find a way to make myself beautiful too, to try to rid myself of the ruined thing inside of me—the constant gnawing feeling that I was hiding something, that some part of my girlhood, and my body itself, was defective, wrong. But there was no way to get rid of the scars, no way to remove the proof that I was different than the other, unmarred girls I grew up with.

I remember clawing at the scars, as if I could scrape the ugliness away, as if I could cleanse it out of myself from the outside in. When that didn’t work, I scrubbed at my back with a washcloth I’d covered with dish soap. I was getting hysterical by then, my face screwed up with panic. My skin was flushed with shame and I was crying so hard that I didn’t hear her come in, but when I looked up she was in the doorway, watching.

Grammy knelt down on the bathroom floor so that we were at eye level, and she grabbed both of my hands in hers. My fingers were bloody from scratching the skin around the scars, and the blood smeared into a faint red on her palms. She stared at me for a minute, like she was trying to remember something she hadn’t recalled for years, and then she cleared her throat. “Raya, this is God’s doing. He makes everything in his image, you know. And so he gave you these wings, like an angel. You know, when you were born, the parts of your back they had to take out looked just like a baby bird’s. He made you in his image; he made you like him. And you need to accept that.”

Though I never put much weight in God, from then on, whenever I saw the scars, that feeling of disgust that had always risen up in my mouth like bile whenever I saw my body was replaced with a kind of grudging acceptance: Grammy said they were beautiful, that I was marked for some reason, that maybe my being here wasn’t as much of an accident as I’d always felt like it was, and I thought that maybe that could be enough.

♦♦♦

NOW, AT church, Grammy is talking to Mr. Paul. A widower. He’s got two grown girls and a boy in college. She’s flushed and, I notice, she’s put on lipstick. It’s the first time I’ve seen her wear it in years. The lipstick has smeared off on her front teeth, leaving a red streak. Sarah appears at my side so I sidle up to them, crossing my legs then uncrossing them again, as if I’m so impatient for her to leave that it’s making me piss myself.

Grammy notices. “Raya, go get more banana bread.”

I shuffle off, ignoring Sarah even when she sticks her tongue out at me.

....

Ever since Rosie from our school saw her kiss me, I’ve been avoiding Sarah, saying it’s because it’s summer and I’m busy keeping Grammy company. I remind her that it’s August, the month that Granddaddy died all those years ago. Grammy doesn’t sleep so well, just stays up late and listens to the cicadas shrill their last mating calls of the season. But we both know the reason is because we got found out. I tell myself we weren’t doing anything real. Sarah was just practicing for Bryce, the boy she pretends she likes when other girls ask who her crush is, the boy she’ll probably date until she gets out of here, goes to the Bible college in Houston that her dad went to.

Rosie screeched when she saw us, her lips a tight white line and hands clenched into shaking fists.

Later that day Sarah put her hands on my back, and I know she felt the wing-bumps because her eyes got wide, but she didn’t say anything. She’d seen them before, of course, despite my trying to keep her from noticing, twisting my back when I changed in front of her in an attempt to hide them, but she’d never touched them before, had never felt the ridges of scar tissue that mark my back like a messy landscape—terrain that even I, after all this time, have a hard time bringing myself to feel.

..

Sarah finally corners me outside the church, in the backyard. “Raya?”

“Yeah, what is it?”

“Are you ignoring me?” She narrows her eyes. “Because we didn’t do anything wrong.”

I look around, make sure no one’s watching. “Yeah, we did.” 

“What did we do?”

“Rosie saw us.”

She flushes. “We were just pretending.” “That’s what I told her.”

She shrugs. “Then we’re not in trouble.”

I see Grammy walking up to me. Her cheeks are pink. She’s holding a card with what looks like a phone number written on it.

“Okay, kiddo.”

Sarah puts on her best Good Girl smile, shifts her weight onto one hip. “Hi, Mrs. Lewis.”

She grins. “Hi, Sarah. You should come over later. I’ll make my famous bread pudding. You know, Raya’s birthday is coming up soon too.”

“I’d like that.”

“Of course. Come over any time you like, hon.”

“Thanks. I will.” She gives me a look, the same look she gave me that day under the bleachers at school, about a few minutes before Rosie stopped us, but it was already too late. We were already gone.

**
Brynne Rebele-Henry was born in 1999. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Rookie, and Blackbird, among other places. Her writing has won numerous awards, including the Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has two books of poetry: Fleshgraphs and Autobiography of a Wound, which won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Orpheus Girl is her first novel.

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Original music by CatLofe